An Elegant Escapade
by PreludeInZ
Summary: Being an examination of the relationship between John Tracy and Penelope Creighton-Ward, aromantic-asexuality, and the depth and importance of platonic friendships. art credited to Marvin Madrid at iseeinstoryboards tumblr com
1. lady and gentleman

**lady and gentleman**

 _Wherein Lady Penelope requires a date to a garden party and Scott Tracy goes through the roster._

 **TRACY ISLAND, 2060**

"What do you _mean_ Gordon's not available?"

As though this is the most offensive thing in the entire world, and nations will crumble, all because Gordon's off tagging flightless cormorants in the Galapagos.

Scott's not entirely sure why they're having this conversation in the first place, as it's founded on a fundamentally flawed premise. "Lady P, I know the term _playboy_ gets thrown around gossip rags with the family name attached to it, but we're not exactly available to rent by the hour."

"I had no intention of _paying_ for him."

"Well, depending on what you want him for, it's possible you couldn't afford him anyhow." There's a moment of silent gratitude for the fact that holograms can't throw things, though the slight narrowing of Penelope's eyes is enough to shave a few minutes off his lifespan. Scott clears his throat and queries, "What _do_ you want him for, anyway?"

It's Scott's job—well, one of many—to look out for his younger brothers. And because it's Lady Penelope, off-colour jokes aside, there's no doubt her intentions are anything but sterling when she says, "I need someone of unimpeachable character and rather higher social class to accompany me to a social function."

Scott takes a moment to translate this from high-socialite into boy-next-door-plebeian, and, "…you need a _date_?" A beat. "And you think Gordon falls under the heading of _unimpeachable character_? He sealed and flooded the dean's office in college. From the _inside_. There was the incident at the fireworks factory. He did that naked photoshoot for Greenpeace. They didn't ask him to. He's _still_ not allowed back in New Hampshire, and legal's been at that for the better part of a year. If you're expecting the company of people who do any kind of digging, Penelope, anyone who scratches the surface is gonna find some fairly unbecoming shenanigans."

Penelope sighs and there's the very barest suggestion of an unladylike pout. "But he makes _me_ look good."

"Well, he's in the Galapagos for the rest of the week. Sorry, Lady P, but it's been on the books for months and he's been looking forward to it. If I told him he had to break it off, he'd probably secede from the family." Another pause and then, almost hesitantly, "You said this Sunday? _I_ _'m_ available. You know how I look good in a cummerbund."

"Oh, Scott." Her soft, silver laugh isn't insulting, not in the least. Not even a little. "Well, first of all it's to be a garden party, black-tie would be horrifically inappropriate. And it's tremendously sweet of you, but I do have to decline. You understand, I'm sure."

Scott doesn't, in fact, and he's learned that playing the ingenue to Penelope's femme fatale rarely works out in anyone's favour. There've been some harmless overtures, some nods and winks and the sort of friendly, flirtatious banter that Scott can't seem to help around women he likes. Still, he'd only been trying to help her out. "Well, no, I don't actually. Uh. Not as such. What's Gordon got that I haven't got, besides an arrest record in New Hampshire? C'mon, Lady P, it wouldn't have to be a _thing_."

Penelope laughs, affectionate. "Darling, we simply look too good together. Heirs and heiresses really must never dabble in public unless they're being serious or being _political_. Oh, no, Scott, you must imagine the headlines. _Lady Creighton-Ward Courts American Billionaire_. I simply can't do with the rumors." She waves a hand, airy dismissal, "Besides that, you're far too tall."

"Oh." Well, this is why IR has a London Agent to begin with. "Uh. Well, who else—"

"Virgil? Oh, _do_ tell me you can spare Virgil, I'll make sure there's a grand piano and he can be perfectly charming. No one ever expects those hands to know their way around Rachmaninoff, and I adore seeing him surprise people."

Scott coughs and rubs his nose, reclining on the couch and squinting up at Penelope's hologram. "Well—"

"And he makes me look dainty."

"You're plenty dainty without Virgil. No, I need him. You can have Brains."

To her credit, Penelope manages not to scoff. "I'm not subjecting Brains to an afternoon like this. I'm far too fond of him."

Scott laughs and leans forward, fairly sure that the Lady's let something slip. "Aha. So the truth comes out. Is this going to be an _ordeal_ , Pen? Sounds like I'm getting out by the skin of my cummerbund."

Penelope sighs and rolls her eyes, crossing her legs. She's comfortably at home, just like Scott is, but the tenor of the conversation has changed. There's a metaphorical bargaining table between them and though Penelope's radiant and lovely in a dress of soft, pastel florals, _metaphorically_ she's in a razor sharp black pantsuit with stiletto heels. "Can I be perfectly honest with you, Scott?"

"Demonstrably? No. But give it a shot anyway."

"I have a problem, and I need help." The Lady sighs, and it's possible that her distress is real and genuine, but Scott still doesn't _quite_ buy it. Especially when she leads with the nature of her problem, "My Great Aunt Sylvia is hosting a garden party."

"Call the national guard!"

A look silences him, but he grins anyway and she continues. "When my Aunt Sylvia hosts a garden party, the guest list is ninety-percent members of the European intelligence community. This is the first year my father has declined his invitation, or I wouldn't be in this position. I need to be on the arm of someone with a mind like _razor wire_ , and failing that, I need someone so perfectly _everyman_ that a spy doesn't know what to _do_ with him. So Gordon or Virgil. _You_ _'re_ too corporate. Brains is too easy to fluster."

"Kayo?"

"Same problem you present me, just a slightly different set of rumors."

Scott's mother and father raised a gentleman, so he refrains from the sort of comment that would get him slapped. Scott's mother and father raised a gentleman, and a gentleman is always willing to help a lady in need. Scott's mother and father raised the eldest of five brothers, and the eldest of five brothers is always ready and willing to throw one of the younger under the bus, at need. And there's a final card in Scott's hand, though it's one he rarely ever plays, "John's down."

And Penelope lights up. "Hand him over."

That's a little too eager. That's enough to make even an eldest brother rethink his choice of sacrificial lamb. "Lemme ask him first, he's only been on the ground for a day and a half."

"Spare him the chance to say no, just put him in something with wings and tell him there'll be canapes and he needs to wear something in linen."

Scott's already backpedaling, what with the way the light seems to catch Penelope's canines. "John's almost as tall as I am, though."

"Yes, but he's redheaded and he parts his hair differently. Don't tell him to wear anything, just tell me his inseam, I'm not chancing him wearing something that'll clash. Never mind. I'll ask Brains, he has all the specifications for your uniforms. Send him early. Have you asked him yet? I'll ask him if you don't."

"He's probably sleeping, he won't pick up. I'll ask him for you." Scott's gotten stuck. "Hang on, though. _I_ _'m_ too tall, but John's not?"

"John's an autumn, you're a winter, I can wear different shoes." Penelope claps her hands, a little girlish and disproportionately delighted, "Oh and he's _clever_. I didn't know he was home! Oh, this solves _everything_! Scott, you _must_ make sure he says yes. Please, oh, _please_ , beg if you have to. On my behalf, just fling yourself on the floor. Be very dramatic."

" _John_ _'s_ clever, but I'm not?"

She waves a hand again and elegantly steps around the question, as though she hasn't heard. "No one knows who John _is_. It's _brilliant_. _I_ didn't even think of him, that's how easy it is to forget about John."

Scott's wondering whether Gordon really _would_ secede from the family, but he gets up anyway, rubs a hand at the back of his neck. "Well, I mean, I'll _ask_. But he probably hasn't quite got his land-legs back, he'll probably crash into a buffet table or something, I can't make any promises—"

He'd said it at the beginning of the conversation, that they're none of them up for rent. But Penelope's not above a well-placed bribe, when the occasion calls for it. "Get John out here by Saturday and there's a case of twenty-five year old Glenmorangie in it for you. Deal?"

If she were physically present and not a lady besides, Scott would have spat in his palm to shake on it. As it is, her word's as good as gold, and Scott's a consummate gentleman when it comes to matters of business. " _Sold_."


	2. wants and needs

**wants and needs**

 _Wherein texting persists as a form of communication and a bargain is struck between old friends_

 **TRACY ISLAND, 2060**

P: good afternoon, lovely! heard you were down, just saying hello 3

P: when did you get back?

J: Recently.

P: darling, were you sleeping? didn't think you'd answer if I woke you.

J: Can't sleep, dehydrated. Headache. Vertigo. Actively dying. otherwise fine. how are you?

P: aw, lamb. I'm quite well, terribly sorry you're feeling poorly.

J: stop the earth please, I'd like to get off now.

P: afraid my influence doesn't go much further than the British isles, pet. might I call?

J: see above, re: headache.

P: so sorry, sweetheart

J: too many nicknames, what do you want?

P: ass.

J: not my area, ask Gordon.

P: I tried, he's in the Galapagos.

J: I know, he's been texting me pictures of birds every 20 minutes, trying to cheer me up.

P: but that's sweet though!

J: plenty cheerful. need sleep, not birds.

P: well, I need a favour.

J: want =/= need

P: I said need.

J: said =/= meant

P: remember that time I saved your life?

J: I remember that you mix it up with the time i nearly suffocated in open space because you thought I was sending you selfies.

P: but you didn't! And you're very welcome, by the way, not that you ever thanked me.

J: are you actually calling in that favor or can I go back to sleep

P: saving your life is just a favour now? we seem to have a mismatch in our understanding of the scale of the average favour.

J: I'm asleep now. I'm sleeping.

P: I need a date for a garden party.

J: I'm going to take that as a concession that my assessment of your contribution to lifesaving is more accurate than yours. also, no.

P: please?

J: noooooooo

P: I never ask you for anything.

J: this is probably why. and last week you asked me to "hack" into Prada's HQ because you wanted to know about next year's handbags.

P: and you wouldn't do it because you're an utter bastard.

J: poor little rich girl.

P: come to my party.

J: don't wanna.

P: why not? what are you down for anyway?

J: well, it's not exclusively to be of use to you. I have to recertify a bunch of qualifications for my space operations license.

P: Boring! tedious bureaucracy. come with me to a lovely English garden party, there'll be caviar and croquet and charming company. My great aunt is hosting, she's delightful, she'll adore you.

J: give me some real incentive if you want me to think about it.

P: erasure of a life-debt

J: I don't owe you a life debt.

P: case of scotch.

J: I don't drink scotch.

P: two cases of scotch.

J: I still don't drink scotch.

P: case of meteorites.

J: that doesn't even make sense.

P: it's very good scotch, you'd like scotch if you drank this scotch. case of scotch, and I'll make scott beg you to go.

J: Hm.

P: scotch can be leveraged to make scott do things. proven fact.

J: When?

P: Any minute now.

J: I mean the party. and what?

P: Sunday. And never you mind.

J: I need to be in Houston tuesday morning.

P: you'll be there with bells on, perfectly refreshed and ready for your tedium, you have my word.

J: it's not tedium, it's a legal requirement if I want to stay in orbit for the rest of the year. English garden parties = tedium.

P: you've been stuck on an island for too long, you're an absolute bastion of incivility. you and your brothers, it's like Lord of the Flies.

J: right, the book about the inherent savagery of the english upper class. You're literally trying to buy me, and WE'RE the ones who're like lord of the flies. Also I live in space.

P: Hush.

J: There's knocking. have you actually gotten scott involved?

P: you know, I actually have.

J: You can't think he'll actually beg.

P: Bet he will.

J: hmmmmmmmm.

P: if he does, then you owe me a game of croquet.

J: we played croquet at your last birthday and you drank too much champagne and tried to hit me with a mallet.

P: well don't cheat this time.

J: a basic grasp of physics isn't cheating.

P: Go answer the door. You have fun at my parties, and we'll have a wonderful time. Thank me later.

J: Don't count your chickens before they've actually accepted your invitations.

P: Text me back to tell me yes.

J: You have a real problem with foregone conclusions. Maybe.

P: talk to you soon.


	3. begging and pleading

**begging and pleading**

 _Wherein posted warnings are ignored and Scott Tracy obligingly flings himself on the floor._

 **TRACY ISLAND, 2060**

There's a sign on John's door, and it just says " **DON** **'T** ".

Scott's always been the sort of person who considers posted warnings to be taken as suggestions rather than the subjects of strict observance. Still, he knocks softly the first time he knocks. When there's no answer, the second, third, fourth times are all a crisp military tattoo.

When the door opens, Scott's reminded that—fresh out of orbit, at least—John's actually probably just a hair taller than he is. He wonders if that factors into Penelope's calculations. Probably.

He's interrupted in further musing by a flat, irritable, " _What_."

Diplomacy is probably a good way to go. John usually needs about forty-eight hours to readjust to gravity before he's even remotely approachable. Still, Scott's willing to chance it. So, casual, friendly, he asks, "Good afternoon, how're you feeling?"

"Sorry for _you_ , seeing as apparently you've up and gone blind." John taps his one-word sign, pointedly. Then he leans against the door frame, long and lean in a pale blue t-shirt and sweatpants, hair still slightly tousled from sleep. And _glaring_. Baleful. Scott's got his work cut out for him. "If you're not here to tell me the house is on fire, then I'm slamming this door."

"So still a bit under the weather, then," the eldest concludes, proof against John's particular brand of sullen melodrama.

"Did you ever have to do that thing in the air force where you get sat in the centrifuge and flung around at twenty-G? Approximately like that."

"Well, I was less of a big baby about it, at least."

"If you want something from me, I feel obliged to inform you that this conversation hasn't started well."

It might be safest just to cut to the chase. "Penelope called, she needs a favour."

"Good for Penelope. I need to know every change that's been made to lower earth orbit regulatory conventions since 2055 so I can re-up my SOL. Whatever she wants, I'm not available, I've gotta study."

Flattery. Flattery might work, because sometimes it does. John's brilliant, knows it, and knows everyone _else_ knows it, but still occasionally likes to be told. So Scott scoffs lightly, gives his brother a winning smile, dimples and all, "C'mon, John. Half the time the book gets thrown at anybody in low earth orbit, _you_ _'re_ the guy throwing it. You know your SOL regs backwards and forwards, this is just a formality."

John arches an eyebrow, a tenuous invitation for Scott to continue. "Besides, when I say _favour_ —it's not really exactly a favour, as such. I mean, she did ask, but I think it'd be good for you, too. She's, uh, she's got a party to go to, and she wanted some company."

"Gordon."

"Galapagos."

"Virgil, then."

"I need him, can't do without TB2 and the pods."

"Alan?"

"He's _seventeen_ , and you can't trust him anywhere with a buffet table. He'll stuff himself full of cake and oysters make himself sick. And I need him around to back Virgil up."

"You do it, then."

Scott spreads his hands, as though he's helpless in the matter. "I mean, usually I'd be more than willing to go, but with you out of orbit 'til you requalify—well, _someone_ has to keep IR running, right?"

John shrugs. "I can set up at Dad's desk and do that from the ground. You go."

It's occasionally true about John—and funnily enough he has it in common with Penny—that he'll pull strings and shove people about, like they're pieces on a chessboard. Scott's got an uncomfortable feeling about the way John's looking at him, like he already knows what the next move will be. "Well, truth be told, I did offer."

"And?"

"Apparently I'm too tall."

"I'm taller than you are."

"Not _usually_ ," Scott huffs, defensive. This is a point of contention that's existed between them for _years_ , but now's not the time to get into it. Wanting something from John as he does, potentially Scott might need to let him _win_ their years-old argument. "—but never mind. It's something to do with her shoes, I guess. Uh, so I don't know what _that_ _'s_ about, but she did ask for you specifically, once she knew you were home."

"Mmm."

John has an unfortunate habit—potentially born of being more accustomed to holograms that can be waved away once he's done with them—of just walking away in the middle of a conversation, and he does so now. He turns from the door and crosses his room back to his bed, drops back onto the mattress and hunts down his comm from a tangled mess of jersey sheets and soft blankets. When Scott follows him into the darkened bedroom and puts his hands on his hips, the redhead seems to remember that they were having a discussion, "Nah. I don't think I'm up to it, I'll call her and politely decline."

Scott's already made a mental note to make sure there are spheres of ice around for the arrival of a case of twenty-five year old scotch. He's already idly glanced through the reviews of the spirit in question, been tempted— _seduced_ —by the promise of soft, sweet florals, a creaminess on the palate. The heady pleasure of a long, oaky finish. Penelope's the sort of person who knows exactly where his buttons and levers are, even if only in the sense of imbibition. He's glad they've never gone beyond the shallow end of playful flirting, because that way madness lies. And Scott's well aware that he doesn't have what it takes to drive _Penelope_ crazy. "John, come on. She's a family friend and you're never around. Probably she just wishes you spent more time together, you two were close in college."

"It was a one year linguistics program at Oxford, she was the only person I knew, we're hardly joined at the hip."

"You're still close, though," Scott persists, because it's true. Everyone _likes_ Penelope, but there's something about John that's always seemed to click with their London Agent. There's a definite resonance. Scott's _definitely_ not imagining it, because the people outside the family with whom John has a genuine rapport can be counted on one hand, and comprise a list that starts with Brain and ends with EOS. Anyone who'd make friends with John is statistically significant. "She asked for you _personally_."

And there's a case of Glenmorangie at stake.

"And that's why I'm calling to turn her down in _person_ ," John answers, flat on his back in bed, pulling up Penelope's contact page. John waves a hand, like his brother is blue and translucent and will disappear with the gesture. As an afterthought, he adds, "Bye, Scott."

Crap. "I think you should go."

The very worst thing in the world, the mistake one must _never_ make, is letting John get any kind of leverage. There's a faint gleam in his eyes, and it's more than just the light coming off the small screen in his hands. "And I think _you_ should go. I mean, I think you should leave. I don't care if you go with Penny. The hint was 'bye, Scott'. I can say it again?"

"John, come off it."

"Why're you playing the middleman, anyway? What's in it for you?"

Scott coughs awkwardly. Time to tread carefully. "Because she asked me to, actually. She didn't want to call your private line in case you were sleeping, I said I'd ask for her, since you can be so _damn prickly_ sometimes. Look, I think she really wants to see you. I think it'd be good for you to go somewhere off the job for once. Put in an appearance! No one ever sees you anywhere, people forget you even exist."

"You say that like it's a bad thing."

"She told me to _beg_ if I had to. Fling myself on the floor. She said to tell you there'd be canapes, as though that's some kind of incentive. I forget what those are, I get my hors d'oeuvre mixed up. Are they like vol au vents? What are the little pastry ones? Go find out and report back. C'mon, John, there's…augh. There's a bottle of scotch in it for you if you go?" This is business, this is striking a bargain. This is bribery, by proxy. This is not _begging_.

John just laughs at that, but he sits up. "Where does everybody come by the idea that I drink scotch?" Scott shrugs, covers up the fact that he _knows_ John doesn't drink scotch. His gratitude that his younger brother is uninterested in a share in his potential haul is dissolved by the way John grins. Scott's improbably reminded of Penelope, and the way she lights up when she catches a glimpse of what she wants. " _Begging_ , though."

" _No_."

"Flinging yourself on the _floor_."

Scott groans at his brother, folds his arms. "You're being a child."

There's no one like a second brother for petty power plays. "Yeah. Little bit. I'd go if you begged me to. I really _should_ see Penny again. Been a while. Since her last birthday, I think. I owe her a croquet rematch, I beat her last time and she had a handicap of like, three mimosas. Must be important if she'd ask you to _beg_."

" _Please_ , then." Scott's fumbling in metaphorical pockets for the sort of currency that catches John's attention and coming up with spare change and dryer lint. "She says it's because you're cleverer than I am," he adds, halfheartedly taking another shot at flattery.

"Objectively true. Politeness is hardly begging."

With a roll of his eyes and the private concession that sometimes being the bigger brother means being the bigger person—Scott drops to his knees on the carpet and adopts a classic posture, hands clasped and entreating, through _heavy sarcasm_ , "Please, oh _please_ won't you go to her Ladyship's party?"

John's already got his phone in hand, but the room is dark enough that the flash of the camera is necessary. And Scott jumps, startled, before cursing a blue streak at his grinning brother, who answers, "Yeah, okay. She texted me, like, five minutes ago. I said I'd be there. Any chance I can get a lift?"


	4. canapes and vol au vents

**canapes and vol au vents**

 _Wherein suspicions are first aroused and charming company is promised._

 **A GARDEN PARTY, 2060**

Anybody who's officially nobody attends Sylvia Creighton-Ward's annual garden party. That is to say, anybody with an identity or three and a past checkered by various types of intelligence work receives an RSVP. Usually addressed to an alias, typically through several proxies. Not one of them would dream of turning the invitation down. No retired, semi-retired, or obviously-still-operating operative with even the slightest ounce of self-respect would pass up the opportunity to swap stories, exchange intel, make connections-and surreptitiously attempt to plant surveillance devices on the grounds

It's an exquisite affair, planned for months, with the Lady Sylvia's personal oversight playing sharp over every last detail. So as the first of the guests begin to arrive, the grounds are manicured into utter perfection, the kitchens are starting to wind up into the production of a carefully curated menu, and all of the staff have been fitted with wireless transmitters, and given strict instructions to loiter near any potentially interesting conversations.

So when Sylvia's own niece turns up, _not_ , as expected, in the company of her father and loyal chauffeur, but on the arm of some tall, redheaded, and previously unmentioned suitor— _well_. First of all, there are words that need to be had with Lord Hugh about his failure to formally decline his invitation. Second of all, it's appallingly bad form for Penelope to be escorted by someone whom her Aunt hasn't personally vetted.

At Lady Sylvia's elbow is her own second-in-command, the family butler. Still smiling from the top of the stairs down into the garden's courtyard, she turns her head just slightly and murmurs, "Find out who the devil that is." And then, appropriately grandiose, Lady Creighton-Ward the elder descends the stairs to greet her niece and her uninvited guest.

"You said she was delightful," John mutters under his breath, as Penelope's Great-Aunt Sylvia swans across the lawn, straight for them, with the sort of intensity of purpose that doesn't bode at all well. "She looks like she wants to _eat me_."

Penelope laughs, the sort of lovely and musical laugh that is not at all reflective of whether or not something was funny. Usually the opposite. She's got her arm threaded through John's, and her hand pats his forearm through the sleeve of a pale grey linen suit, tailored for the occasion, with a waistcoat to match her soft, fluttery dress of blue chiffon silk. John knows Penelope better than to ask just how exactly she'd come by a suit, tailored specifically to his measurements, with less than a day's notice. "There exists the possibility that I, ah, that I neglected to tell her you were coming. And that she's expecting my father. And that my father and Parker have begged off to go fishing in Scotland. _And_ ," there's the slightest suggestion of smugness in Penelope's tone, "she has no idea who you are."

"—is that generally a problem in these sorts of circles?"

"Almost everyone here is a member of one intelligence agency or another, sometimes two, ambitiously three. And Aunt Sylvia knows who _everyone_ is, and I've gone and turned up with someone she can't place on sight. Can't help that you're not even _thirty_. You and I are offensively young, John, darling. Most of the guest list is over fifty. We'll irritate _everybody_."

John refrains from groaning about this. Aunt Sylvia's progress across the lawn is interrupted by an encounter with an older gentleman, with graying brown hair and a monocle. This is the first time John's encountered a monocle in the wild, having thought they existed mostly for the purpose of caricature. As it stands, Lord Monocle is merely the provider of a temporary stay of execution. "Charming company, you said. Very specifically, you promised charming company."

Penelope waves a hand and there's that airy laugh again, as though he's the funniest, most eloquent companion imaginable. This is untrue. "As though you care about the calibre of the company in the least. Don't worry about Great-Aunt Sylvia, she'll be perfectly civil. Even if it's a matter of personal offense that you're not identifiable on sight."

" _Civil_. Is this the same Aunt who dispatched a room full of arms dealers with a cocktail fork in Cairo in 2045?"

"Well, no, you'll find she did _that_ with a cleverly poisoned pot of mint tea and an undercover identity _months_ in the making. The cocktail fork was in Bangladesh."

"Oh, in _that case_ —" John sighs and shakes his head. There's a hint of uncharacteristic unease in his tone when he asks, "Is this going to be Oxford again?"

Penelope blinks and looks up, mildly confused. "What about Oxford?"

John shrugs and then starts as Aunt Sylvia lets fly with a laugh that sounds too close to Penelope's to be a coincidence. Lord Monocle appears to be wrapping up the conversation, and it's probably time to be sure of just where he's supposed to stand. "Oh," he starts, suddenly sheepish, "That whole advantageously ambiguous way in which you and I hung around each other, and sort of just deliberately obfuscated the question of whether or not we were more than 'just friends'—"

"Because it was so _very_ improbable that you and I could be just friends."

"—and conveniently kept anybody else from doing something so tasteless as interfering. _That_ sort of arrangement?"

Penelope smiles fondly, and the way she squeezes John's arm and tips her forehead against his shoulder is pure, genuine affection. "No. I'll tell her _exactly_ who you are, and she can chew her teeth down to the gums trying to find the kernel of whatever she thinks is the truth. You're my very dear friend and her parties are hideously boring, and you're along so I have someone whose company I can actually _enjoy_. No double-talk and mind games, no _spying_. Whatever anyone asks me, I don't care, I'm going to tell the plain and simple truth. Just a lovely afternoon with charming company."

That gets a smile, a glint of green eyes. "And I believe you promised caviar."

Penelope scoffs, lightly toys with the cufflink peeking out from beneath the sleeve of John's suit "You hate caviar. Canapes, though. And vol au vents and crudites and very tiny quiches and _champagne_. And croquet, but this time no cheating."

"Croquet, sure, but no champagne, you nearly cracked my skull open last time."

This time, Penelope's laugh is genuine, real and warm and the rare sort of expression of emotion that only her very dearest friends can get out of her, even as Aunt Sylvia descends, smiling, to slice apart her companion with silver-edged questions and sharp examination. Penelope's only too happy to answer. After all, whatever their quality, nothing stymies a spy faster than a boldly told, bare-faced truth.

Sylvia returns to her butler, visibly incensed in the way that only a member of her household staff can discern. Several waiters have already veered out of her path. Guests continue to arrive, some of the most highly-trained and cunning members of the shadowy world of European intelligence. None notice the fact that Sylvia Creighton-Ward is building up a towering furor, brick by brick.

"Well?" she demands of her butler, rejoining him just outside the back door of the manor's kitchens. "Who is he? Because the absolute and utterly insulting load of tripe my darling niece has just attempted to sell me simply _cannot_ be allowed to go uninvestigated."

Werthers is a trusty servant and a formidable agent in his own right, and he inclines his head deferentially to the lady of the house. "Afraid the first of our inquiries have turned up precious little, your ladyship. Facial recognition returns either an up and coming Norwegian actor or a double-agent out of Cape Town. Neither are quite spot on, though."

Sylvia's eyes narrow and she turns to look out into the garden again, at her niece and the man at her arm, engaged in a discussion with Lord Derringer, apparently about his monocle. The redhead seems especially interested. Penelope's smile is broad and blissful as she looks up across the courtyard, happens to glance at her aunt through one of the garden windows. She waves and, at the very height of inelegance, blows a kiss.

"He's American," Sylvia observes, though the conversation had been short and therefore woefully lacking anything that might tell more about his identity. "Call in some favours from across the pond." She snorts, in the sort of way that goes unexcused in front of household staff. "Honestly. 'The fifth member of International Rescue'. Everyone _knows_ there's only four of them. She must think I'm getting soft in my old age. Keep me informed, Werthers. I want to know _exactly_ who he is, and more importantly, who he is to _my niece_."

"Of course, my lady."

And then, with her ladylike smile and her laugh like a silver spear, Sylvia returns to the party, determined to teach her niece a sharp lesson in manners.


	5. meetings and migraines

**meetings and migraines**

 _Wherein stress causes migraines and the meet-cute is subverted._

 **OXFORD COLLEGE, 2054**

The library is open until two in the morning, which is generous, for a library. Only it's just ticked past quarter after four, and John jerks awake when the alarm on his watch starts beeping in his ear. He's supposed to go for a run at five. This is going to be challenging, as he doesn't think he can actually lift his head off the table.

But there's that alarm, and it forces the issue. It's a tiny, needling little sound, little stabs of pressure in his skull, and he stifles it with his other hand, fumbling for the button to turn it off. John's neck is stiff and the pain behind his eyes is pulsing, throbbing, like some hideous _alive_ thing. It's the headache that had driven him out of the dull, persistent noise of the dorms, had him taking refuge in the nearest library, to bury himself in his textbooks and try to get the reading done. But falling asleep at its onset has done him no favours, and it's a migraine now.

Great.

Migraines are an Oxford thing. He hadn't gotten them at MIT, not even juggling two doctorate programs and living on his own for the first time. Dual degrees in astrophysics and computer science, a two year linguistics program is supposed to be a _cakewalk_ , after that. Even trying to get it done in one year. Even if it had been at his father's suggestion, something _useful_ to fill the time while International Rescue's space station was being constructed.

England, Oxford. It was supposed to be kind of like a vacation. Not that England has done anything but be cold and damp and rainy, while his family's made the move to an island in the South Pacific.

So, he doesn't really know anyone. Though the environment had suited him far better, he hadn't even made friends at MIT, really. There hadn't been time, and anyway, John had always prized solitude. It had served its purpose. That's fine, it's not like John's got the sort of personality that has him starved for social contact. So far all he's managed in Oxford is polite cordiality with his linguistics professors, and a passing acquaintance with the daughter of a friend of his father's, who shares a handful of his classes. He's on nodding terms with Lady Penelope.

He's too busy for anything else, because maybe it's the climate or maybe it's the culture shock or maybe it's the fact that it's been three months and he still feels jet-lagged, but it's been harder going than it's really supposed to be.

Because it's just _linguistics_ , for heaven's sake. It's a _social science_ , it's hardly in the same league as an astrophysics degree. With full awareness of the meaning behind the cliche, and with a precise understanding of how to do the latter, it's _not exactly rocket science_.

Except physics has rules. Physics has rules that stay the same, whether you're trying to launch a bowling ball into low earth orbit or a probe to measure solar wind. Physics gets _weird_ at the frayed, fraught edges of understanding, but it's still governed by reason.

At the surface, language is supposed to be governed by the same sorts of universal principles. John's _read_ Chomsky, the human brain is supposed to be hardwired to acquire language. Universal grammar. The rules are supposed to persist throughout, it's just a matter of finding your way down to them. So, what, so he's not a toddler, he's a damned doctorate physicist. It's just _words_.

Whether rendered in words or numbers, it's nearly four-thirty and this means he'd been missed whenever the rounds had been done by security, locking up the place. He doesn't remember dropping off, but it must have been long before the doors had closed. The place is darker and quieter than his dorm room—dark and quiet enough that he's fallen into the trap of the sort of awful, non-restorative sleep that's pushed him over the edge into a real and proper migraine. There's nothing for it, he buries his face in his hands and groans.

John almost doesn't want to leave, but he knows the quiet won't last, even as he shuffles his books into his bag. It won't stay quiet. It won't stay dark, it won't stay empty, and he's got a class to get to. He needs to run at least a mile before that, needs to shower, probably needs to shave. Should eat something, should choke down a handful of painkillers and get through the rest of the day, get to the weekend, where there'll be less pressure. Not a lot less. But a little.

He can work his way through the rest of the migraine, it'll wear itself out. He's still new to dealing with them, there've only been three or four since he started the term. This one isn't even the worst.

Or it isn't, at least, until he rounds the corner out of the stacks, and trips the alarm system's motion detector. The entire world erupts. It's loud enough to split his skull open, and in the few moments of pain before he blacks out completely, he swears he's gone blind.

* * *

Oxford College's Security Services are located in a building called the Old Observatory. Penelope Creighton-Ward _certainly_ hasn't done anything that would put her at odds with the smartly uniformed officers that patrol the campus after dark. She's certainly not startled by the call from the security office, because _that_ would imply she has any sort of reason to be nervous about being contacted by security. Which of course, she does not. Certainly she's not the person who's been bugging assorted professors' offices for practice. Anyone who might've ratted her out is, first of all, a liar, and second of all, a filthy snitch.

It turns out it's not anything to do with her—though sleepy and with her phone propped against the pillow beneath her face, it takes a minute or so before she's awake enough to realize that she's not the one in trouble. That the voice in her ear is talking about someone else. It takes a further few moments for her to put a face to the name.

"Well…yes, I suppose I know John Tracy. We've a few classes together. I wasn't aware he had my phone number. May I ask what this is in regards to?"

It takes some explanation, but in the course of being given the particulars, she's already curious enough to have removed herself from the deep cottony comfort of her bed, pulled on a sweater dress and leggings, swept her hair into an effortlessly chic french knot and knotted a silk scarf around her neck. She grabs her keys and her purse and is breezily out the door, the peculiarity of the situation just enough to have piqued her curiosity, even if it _is_ five in the morning.

Penelope's apartment is off-campus, and it's less of an apartment and more of a penthouse flat, complete with private elevator and three bedrooms, though one of these is currently serving as a closet. She likes it. She thinks it's cozy. Actually, compared to the manor, it's a little spartan and the open floor plan means it's really far brighter and airier than really merits the use of the word "cozy", but never mind. It takes her fifteen minutes from her front door to catch a bus onto the campus proper, and a further ten to find her way to the security offices.

The entire way there she's made a mental list of everything she knows about John Tracy. Son of one of her father's friends. Red-headed, approximately six foot two, a bit vague. Handsome, but either unavailable or uninterested in pursuing or being pursued by anyone who might _notice_ he's handsome. Shy, perhaps. Quiet, certainly. Nods in her direction, if and when he happens to notice her. Taking an accelerated linguistics program, has an abominable accent and doesn't conjugate very well.

So when she crosses the threshold into the security office, clearly expected, she's put on the air of someone who's thoroughly convinced that this has all been a dreadful misunderstanding, and of course her dear friend John wouldn't be lurking around the library after hours, there's obviously a perfectly mundane explanation—

—and there is. No theatrics necessary, an honest mistake. Penelope's grand gestures deflate somewhat, upon the explanation that the security office isn't holding John, per se, it's just that the poor bastard's in a bit of a state and they didn't feel it was safe to release him on his own. He'd declined a trip to the hospital, but conceded that he could do with some help getting back to his dorm.

The list of people he'd given them to call had been astonishingly short. It had, in fact, had only one name on it, and that name had been hers.

This just about boggles the mind, even a mind as sharp and clever and creative as Penny's. In _all_ of Oxford after the first half of an entire semester, apparently, Penelope's still the only person he knows. Or, at least, the only person he could think to call, upon being apprehended in one of the campus libraries, after having fallen asleep after hours. The daughter of a friend of his father, and _she_ _'s_ all he's got.

There's something about this notion that makes Penelope rather sad. Poor lamb, not a friend in the world—or at least, not in the part of the world that constitutes Oxford, England.

Well, it certainly won't do. Not on Penelope's watch. She's escorted back through the security office, rather like she's about to go and collect a newly rescued puppy. This is analogy remains rather apt, as she collects a poor, pathetic creature, who whimpers and whines until taken home, provided with water and food and a soft, cozy bed in the guest room.

It's not until the next morning, after he's been provided and permitted enough time for his brain to invert itself back from being inside-out, that Penelope parks herself cheerily at the foot of the bed and informs her newly acquired best friend that they are, in fact, best friends now, and wouldn't he like to have a shower and get dressed and go somewhere lovely for brunch?

This is, after all, what best friends are for.


	6. selfies and louboutins

**selfies and louboutins**

 _Wherein a tactical retreat was required and selfies are exchanged._

 **A HEDGE MAZE, 2060**

"You have to understand the crux of the argument, which is the question of whether a person's true height is reflected with or _without_ the effects of gravity. _He_ says it's an unnatural advantage. But I think it only makes sense that my height gets calculated based off the state I'm most often _in_ —which is microgravity."

"Mmhm."

"If Scott spent months at a time in orbit then sure, he'd be taller than I am."

"Naturally."

"But he doesn't."

"No."

"So he's not."

"Right."

"See, his argument is that humans were never actually meant for space travel and so any reduction in the natural compression of the human spinal column by gravity is cheating. This goes spiralling off into a whole host of other arguments, the principle of which is the frankly insulting and, worse, _deterministic_ suggestion that human kind is meant for anything at all. Scott's argument is flawed in its very premise. If we weren't meant to be in space then we wouldn't be in space. QED."

Penelope's trailing her fingers through the cool, crystal water of one of the fountains in Great Aunt Sylvia's sprawling hedge maze. The sound of the water is preferable to the sound of the distant nattering of conversation, and she doesn't especially care that she's not putting in the appearances she's supposed to be. Penelope's kicked her shoes off and rested them on the sun-warmed stone at the edge of the water and her sigh is deep and appropriately dramatic. John's sitting next to her and she's leaned against his shoulder, comfortable. He may not be, but she doesn't especially care. "You _have_ heard me, each time I've agreed with you?"

"Sure." John shifts slightly, toys with an empty champagne glass, long fingers tracing around the rim. "I just want you to know what you're agreeing with."

"Charitable. But you _do_ tend to belabour the point, John."

"I thought that was just one of the terms of this whole friendship. Agreeing wholeheartedly with each other about subjects on which we are neither informed nor invested."

Penelope laughs softly, elbows her friend in the ribs. "I can't believe you remember that."

John grins, and she hears it in his voice rather than sees it. "Well, you were very explicit. Terms and conditions. I'm pretty sure I had to sign something."

"Explicit is the only thing that _works_ with you."

"No, _you_ just forget that normal people don't _have_ entire conversations in subtext. I'm refreshingly direct."

Penelope scoffs, dips her own glass into the fountain water, and lets a long, slow stream fall back in. "A little _too_ direct, or we wouldn't have needed to make a tactical retreat into the hedge maze."

"A 'tactical retreat' is what we're calling it. You got giggly and it's a 'tactical retreat'."

She doesn't want to be someone who giggles. Giggling is, first and foremost, horrifically undignified and at a party such as her Aunt's, quite possibly a social disaster. So it's with considerable effort that she manages to repeat back the offending item without so much as a tremor in her voice, "You called the Duke of Norfolk 'a hairpiece with an idiot caught underneath it'."

"No one _heard_ me."

" _I_ heard you. And you don't know that no one else did, at a party like this one, I bet half the staff are wired. You can't _say_ those things, now I'll _think_ it every time I have to see him and make an utter fool of myself." Penelope sighs dramatically. "I ought to drown you in the fountain, John Tracy."

John rolls his eyes and there's a slightly patronizing pat of her head. "If I had a penny for every time you've threatened to kill me over some nebulous social faux pas."

"I don't think you've ever even _seen_ a penny in your entire life."

John shrugs and the shift of his shoulders threatens to topple her into the (admittedly only knee-deep) water. "Well, I don't think you could successfully drown me in a fountain. I'd bet a whole penny."

Penelope's contemplating whether to take this as an invitation to prove John wrong, when there's the buzz of the phone in his pocket against her hip. This has happened approximately every seven minutes since they first sat down, and that was half an hour ago. Instead she twists around to sit straight next to him and stretches, wriggles her hips against the numbness in her tailbone. "Who on earth keeps calling you?" She arches an eyebrow and thinks of her compact, stashed securely in the glove compartment of the tiny Aston Martin they'd driven up to her Aunt's estate. As far as she's aware, IR is supposed to be in a cycle of downtime. "You're not supposed to be working?"

John glances at the smartwatch on his wrist, a tastefully styled thing that doesn't even clash too badly with the suit Penelope had picked out for him. He grimaces and rolls his eyes. "Still Gordon. Still with the birds."

"Still?"

John fishes in his pocket and pulls out his phone, a tablet of clear plastic that darkens with the warmth of his hand into a matte black little slab. The front of it illuminates with the time, date, GPS coordinates, and the notification that he has sixteen photo messages waiting. "He's been naming them."

"Aw, bless. Let me see?"

John turns his phone sideways and displays a rather unremarkable seeming bird. Honestly, at least in John's estimation, it's an objectively _ugly_ bird, dull, dishwater grey and too large to be even remotely cute, and instead dopey-looking and maladpated, with stubby wings and an unnattractive face. "This one's name is Mr. Shitty Feet. And that about sets the tenor for the past hundred or so." John thumbs open the message history, reviews the numbers. "One hundred and thirty-four pictures of dim-witted birds. They're partially at risk because they have no natural predators and just anybody can wander up and grab them. I feel like it's a race against natural selection."

Penelope scrolls up and can't help a slight smile at several of the photos, in which Gordon's decided to be a feature, sitting cross-legged with a bird in his lap or on his knee, grinning into the camera. "They _are_ rather daft looking."

"Oh yeah. Gordon's right at home."

Penny feigns a gasp and flicks John in the ear, scolding. "Don't be _mean_."

"A hundred and thirty-four pictures of stupid looking birds!" John pauses a moment. "You want mean? I'll give you _mean_. C'mere."

He puts an arm around her shoulder and in a gesture that's more typical of her than it is of _him_ —puts the camera at arms' length and grins at the little black lens on the face of his watch. Penelope can't help a reflexive pout of her lower lip, a picture perfect rosebud smile and a pair of doe eyes up at the camera, next to John's deceptively innocent grin and a lazy peace sign draped over her shoulder.

Another flick of his fingers across the screen of his phone and then it's off, pinging off several satellites and then around the curve of the Earth, down to the Galapagos and Gordon's rather more rugged, waterproof cellphone. Moments later John's phone starts buzzing in earnest, pinging practically once a second in a flood of outrage.

John mutes his phone and tucks it in his breast pocket. "And that's a masterclass in how to be mean to Gordon. I hope you've taken notes."

" _Honestly_. You're an absolute beast sometimes."

John grins, gets to his feet and dusts his palms off on his trousers before offering her a hand up. "Yeah. Well, you've known me too long for _that_ to be a surprise. Come on, I'm hungry. Let him stew a while and then we'll send him a few shots of the buffet. You promised caviar, think there's foie gras? That'll get his wetsuit in a twist."

Penelope accepts the hand to her feet and reaches up to tweak John's ear again. "Now I know why they make you stay in orbit." She pauses. "I'm sure whatever Aunt Sylvia's serving has been ethically sourced," she says, rallying a rather indifferent defense of the family name as he offers her his arm.

"Let's go interrogate her. I'm hardly Gordon, but I have enough of the broader points to make a hell of a fuss about the massacre of sturgeon necessary to put fish eggs on some asshole's slice of melba toast. Don't forget your shoes."

Lady Penelope makes a face at the pair of glossy Louboutins she's chosen for the day, still abandoned by the fountainside, and sighs. "Gordon was my first choice, you know. _You_ _'re_ entirely too tall, gravity or not. The shoes I've had to wear are dreadful."

"Well, then leave them? You said you didn't want to bother with all the societal convention and social nonsense. Be a little bohemian. Youngest people here, you said. Set the bar."

Penelope gives a scandalized little gasp and glances guiltily at the fountain and her lovely, cream coloured pumps, discarded forlornly beside it. "They're seven hundred dollar shoes," she protests, but weakly, with fine, smooth gravel cool on the soles of her silk-stockinged feet and the thought of the thick, lush grass of the lawn waiting for her.

John just laughs at her. "As though anyone here is hard up to the point where they'd feel the need to make off with your Louboutins."

Penelope chuckles to herself, lets out another heavy sigh. There's a vaguely innocent streak that runs through John, sometimes. "Great Aunt Sylvia would have my hide. Lady Creighton-Ward's custom pumps sold at fetish auction. Entire British nation falls into sea out of sheer embarrassment."

John gives her an appraising glance and then shrugs again, kicks off his own pair of brouged leather loafers and then sets them carefully next to hers. "There," he offers, and holds out his arm again. "No one's going to mess with your shoes with mine hanging around, looking all churlish and surly. And I'm _not_ too tall. Probably lost a whole half inch."


	7. coffee and mimosas

**coffee and mimosas**

 _Wherein demitasse cups are too small for coffee and a friendship begins._

 **OXFORD COLLEGE, 2054**

As far as John can tell, it's not a question that ever gets asked of any of his brothers.

" _Are you making friends?_ "

Maybe because there's no question that wherever Virgil is, there's going to be _someone_ who's warmed up to him, been charmed by his bluff, cheerful practicality and easy straightforwardness. Anywhere Scott goes, he comes home with phone numbers and email addresses. Scott has the whole spectrum of friendships, running the gamut of "pals" and "chums" and "buddies" and can't go anywhere without having _somebody_ to call up to go out for drinks. Gordon does whatever he has to in order to attract a crowd, and then just latches on to whoever pays him the most attention. Alan—well, John _does_ understand about Alan, because it's impossible not to like Alan. His report cards have been coming back with notes about how he's "everyone's friend" ever since he was in kindergarten.

John's always just said, "Oh, yeah, I've met a few people" and then left it at that.

It seems a little less abrasive than the truth, which is, bluntly stated, "No, of course not, why on earth would I do something like that?"

This, apparently, comes across as a little misanthropic. John's always considered this to be everyone _else_ _'s_ problem, rather than his.

There'd been a point at which everyone _else_ _'s_ worrying about it had spilled over, a little. Maybe it was an overheard conversation between his parents, or something snide that one of his brothers had said, but he'd felt the need to do some digging on the subject. Careful, methodical, accounting for his own bias.

Or so he'd thought, anyway. But then, the query hadn't been "why don't I have friends". It had been "why don't I _want_ friends?" He hadn't turned up anything worth worrying about, in any case.

If the catalyst for the beginning of a friendship can be considered to have a formula, most sociological studies seem to narrow it down to the following three criteria:

Physical proximity

Repeated and unplanned interactions

A setting that encourages vulnerability

Well. After the embarrassing incident of the migraine in the library, he's at least filled the last requirement. So maybe he's stumbled into it, through no particular fault of his own.

Apparently friends have brunch together.

John's can't remember offhand the last time he had brunch, so maybe there's something in that. He's not quite ready to stretch the notion that "brunch → friend", so for now he's settled on the quantifiable title of "temporary dining companion to whom I owe a favour", as a social descriptor for the very blonde, very blue-eyed, and objectively very pretty young woman, who's leisurely making her way through a spinach and goat cheese souffle and chattering blithely about nothing he's really had the slightest interest in. Mostly who she is, what she's doing at Oxford, who her _father_ is.

She stops for a moment to have a sip from the grapefruit mimosa she'd ordered (her second), the delicate champagne flute in stark contrast to his own annoyingly small demitasse of black coffee. The waiter can't seem to be persuaded to leave the carafe on the table, and so keeps turning up at John's elbow, pouring a ribbon of hot, black Arabica into his entirely-too-small cup and asking if everything's quite to their liking. Penelope has fielded this question each and every time it's been asked, with an airy wave and an easy smile.

Once the waiter's departed for the seventh time since their meal arrived, Penleope puts her chin in her hands and tilts her head, coquettish. "My, but you're just _dreadfully_ shy, aren't you?"

This is also the first question she's asked of him directly, even if it's technically just her, asking him to confirm an incorrect assumption. John shrugs, answers, "No."

"No?"

"No."

"One word answers make you seem shy."

"There's not really room for 'shy', in my family."

She brightens at this, though she also seems surprised to have gotten to expand on his answer at all. Considering his half of the conversation has mostly been polite "mmm"ing, this isn't exactly unreasonable. "Your _family_ , oh _do_ tell me about your family. Our fathers are friends, you know."

"I knew that."

"And you have brothers."

"Four."

He's not sure if she knows this already, but she acts as though it's new information, leans in as though it's the most surprising and fascinating thing she's ever heard. "Good heavens. Tell me about them?"

"Scott, Virgil, Gordon and Alan."

"Eldest to youngest, I assume. And where do you fall?"

"Sorry?"

"Eldest, youngest?"

"Second eldest."

"Mm. Only child, myself."

"Uh huh. You mentioned."

She laughs, light and soft. "Oh, so you _were_ listening. I was beginning to think you were just an utterly self-absorbed bastard and that my rather charitable attempt to engage with you socially had been completely in vain."

"I'm not sure that's not true."

Somehow this makes her laugh again, louder this time, with a little giggling trail off the end. "I _have_ decided that we're going to be friends, John Tracy. You can be as much of a bastard as you want, I like you anyway."

That's a little personal. John's halfway through a mushroom omelet, and even if they're tiny, he's still had seven cups of coffee, and he's starting to get fidgety. "I'm not a bastard."

The things that Penelope finds delightful are apparently not the things he would have thought. "Standoffish, sat alone in every class, haven't made a _single_ friend in the whole time you've been here, and perhaps _most_ tellingly, meet a perfectly adorable and charming lady—and it's capital-L- _Lady_ —of _my_ calibre and aren't doing everything humanly possible to insinuate yourself into my good graces." Her eyes narrow slightly, appraising, "Actually, John darling, it may make you rather less of a bastard than a lot of people I know."

"Is this supposed to be some sort of position of privilege? Being your friend?"

"Yes. It's like winning the lottery." She sits forward in her chair, reaches across the table and swaps his coffee for the latter half of her mimosa. "Come on. Finish up, we'll go for a walk in the park. Let me at least make a reasonable case before you decide I'm not worth having."

Penelope probably doesn't go for as many walks as she should, puffing slightly as they take a path that runs along the river. That's as good an excuse as any for why she can't seem to keep up with him.

And anyway, his damned _legs_ are too long and she has to walk just a little bit more quickly than usual. It's no wonder she's out of breath, she's halfway jogging just to keep pace. She's worn flats to breakfast and regrets it, because next to John she feels absolutely tiny. It's going to have to be platform heels from here on out, at least four inches of additional height—ideally five—and that's only if she manages to convince him to be friends.

This isn't supposed to be so challenging.

"I just feel like you must be lonely," she starts, managing to catch up as he comes to a bend in the path and a bench at the apex of the curve. He stops and stands beside it for a moment, and she takes the excuse to sit down.

"Why?" he asks, though he remains standing, doesn't take the seat next to her. He kicks scattered gravel from the grass back onto the pathway, stone by tiny stone.

Penelope pauses, still getting her breath back. "Well. _I_ would be lonely, I suppose, if I were in a strange country, far from my family and everything I'd grown up with and doing such ridiculous things as passing out in the languages library at five in the morning. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing that happens to someone whose got a friend to have an eye on them."

John chuckles dryly. "I'm a lot less pathetic when I'm in my element, really. I appreciate your help. No pity necessary."

"Not pity," Penelope disagrees, carefully, not so quickly as to reveal it for a lie. "I don't mean for it to sound like pity. Concern, I suppose. Sympathy, maybe. I don't know, half a semester in Oxford and you haven't made any friends. It's just that I can't imagine—you simply haven't wanted anyone? It just seems so strange to me."

He's turned away and he shifts slightly, shrugs his shoulders. He really _is_ too tall—can't be too much older than her age, and this makes him probably not more than twenty-three. There's still a slight coltishness about his limbs, a way he seems a bit too aware of a lack of anything to do with his hands. "I guess—I mean, I don't know. Four brothers always seemed like plenty. I never really went out of my way looking for extra people."

She can't help it and laughs at the term, " _Extra people_. Good heavens, were you grown in a _vat_? John Tracy, if it's really so _very_ distasteful to you that I might want to be the single solitary person in your social circle as extends beyond the limits of your family, then please, do tell me to stop trying."

"I don't want to be rude."

She laughs at him again, but gets to her feet, goes to the edge of the path to kick fragments of gravel back off it. "I'm not entirely certain you're able to _help_ it. But…well, if that's it, then—"

For the first time he catches her gaze, gives her the same sort of evaluating once over that he's been on the receiving end of, before now. "I mean—I never know how these things are supposed to start. Friends. Or where that's supposed to go. And anyway, just what is that that supposed to entail, though, in this context?" There's a reticence about him, something sort of hesitant as he continues, "Because, look, I'm not—if this is just…if…I mean, if you want this to…to _go_ anywhere—like to _go_ anywhere-go anywhere—I have to tell you; it won't. I don't mean to be unkind and it's not because—it's not that—like, it's not that I'm not sure _you_ _'re_ not…"

Usually she's got a far tighter rein on her expression, but Penelope gets the sense from the way he looks up and blushes that she must be looking at him as though he's grown a second head.

John pauses, backtracks, and then decides the best course of action is simply breaking up with her. "Look. It's not you. It's me."

Penelope's not heard this many negatives stacked up in a single train of thought since the time she'd attempted to dip dye her hair a pretty dusty rose colour and gotten hell from her father. "…well. _Very clearly_ it's you, whatever it is. But if I'm following that muddled up mess of a sentiment, I'm certainly not making any designs on anything more than being just friends, John. If this is the long way around to telling me you're gay—"

"I'm not."

"Or that I'm just not your type—"

"I don't _have_ a type."

"—then that's perfectly fine," Penelope concludes and ducks her head slightly, leans into his field of view to interrupt the very intense survey he's taking of the ground, the line between the grass and the gravel. She's starting to tease out at least a glimmer of suspicion as to what the problem might be. " _Really_. Just friends, John."

He straightens up and she straightens up along with him, gives him a winsome, winning smile. He still seems wary, appraising, but goes on to cautious agreement, "…mmm. Yeah. I mean, okay. Maybe. I still don't really know what that's supposed to _mean_ , though—"

"Nothing terribly taxing," Penelope tells him, cutting in. "Sit with me in class, give me someone to talk to. Brunch, sometimes. Dinner, if that context doesn't spook you too badly. Maybe a movie night now and again. Agree with me about things that are ultimately trivial and upon which you have no actual opinion. Come shopping and talk me out of buying frivolous things. Or into buying frivolous things, either way."

This gets a faint grin, shy, but promising. "Oh, there's a list. I didn't know there'd be a list, I do better with lists. Anything else?"

Penelope tosses her hair, loops her arm through his and pats his hand. "We'll start off fairly simply. Item one: walks in the park." She raps his knuckles lightly with her own. "But _slow down_ , for heaven's sake. Really, you're _entirely_ too tall to be one of my friends, John Tracy. You're very lucky I'm willing to make an exception."


	8. wickets and hedgerows

**wickets and hedgerows**

 _Wherein John Tracy is a competitive bastard and Lady Penelope sets the record straight._

 **A CROQUET PITCH, 2060**

She wouldn't have credited it, but it's possible he's actually _better_ at croquet after five glasses of champagne.

Considering the fact that this was meant to be a handicap, this is _consummately_ unfair.

Great Aunt Sylvia's croquet court is regulation size, a manicured field of springy turf trimmed into a diamond pattern, and bounded by hedges. The pair of them have attracted an audience, and gained an informal referee in the form of the monocled Lord Derringer. Penelope's taken black and blue, John's got red and yellow. And he's currently sighting a second shot, humming pleasantly to himself, and preparing to sabotage her next turn, even though he's at least six points up and she's no threat at all, still languishing between the third and fourth wickets.

Penelope crosses to the edge of the pitch and summons a waiter with a crook of her finger, plucks a glass of champagne off the provided tray. She takes a sip of her own and then saunters in John's direction, still in her bare feet and with her skirt fluttering prettily around her knees. "Here," she declares, thrusting the delicate crystal flute in his direction. "In an attempt to suggest that you should imbibe a bit more sweetness and light and be less of an _utter and absolute bastard_ , John Tracy."

He stands up and gives her a uniquely affectionate—if patronizing—once-over; the sort of up and down examination that belongs to someone who knows her entirely too well. "What's the penalty for pointing out that _you_ wanted the rematch?" he queries, but takes the glass.

" _Death_."

There's the smile that's been hovering around his features the whole afternoon, real and genuine and present in his eyes, even when he's perfectly straight-faced. "At least I'll have gone out doing what I love."

"Making me want to strangle you with your necktie."

"Pretty sure that'd be a contact foul."

Penelope tosses her hair and waves a hand around at the general assembly of amused spectators. "And I'm equally certain everyone here would attest to the fact that you were being insufferably _American_ in the aggression of your style of play, and that I was entirely justified."

John drains his glass and leans on the handle of his mallet. He grins, utterly unabashed. "There've been a lot of death threats this afternoon."

Penelope stamps her bare foot in the grass and folds her arms, pouting. "You're meant to be drunk so I can beat you at croquet."

Tipsy, maybe, if not yet actually drunk. "Pen, this is a game that revolves around hitting balls around a lawn with hammers, played—and invented, I assume—primarily to occupy your countrymen as they loafed around the globe, marinating in gin and whining about the heat in all their stolen colonies. There's nothing of _value_ in winning a game of croquet."

This is a thorny philosophical point, and not one Penelope's willing to play devil's advocate against. She changes tactics. " _Gordon_ would let me win."

"You've never played _anything_ with Gordon, if you think Gordon would let you win." John laughs at her. "Gordon. You know, _Gordon_? Natural athlete, gold medal Olympian, competitive streak about four miles wide? _You_ know. Gordon would evaluate your approximate level of skill when it comes to croquet as she's played—and find you to be about as competent as a _toddler_ , by the by, Pen—and then he'd handicap himself however he felt was appropriate. In your case, he'd probably play blindfolded, drunk, stood on one foot, with two extra balls and the wrong end of the mallet. And he'd _still_ probably beat you." There's a pause, and then, helpfully, "I'm saying you're bad at croquet."

There's a chattery, unfiltered, hyperactive pit stop on the road to getting John properly drunk, or at least drunk enough to inhibit him about the business of playing croquet. And in spite of herself, Penelope can't help a giggle and then the whole illusion of outrage breaks down and before she knows it she's catching her breath and wiping tears of laughter from her eyes. "But, darling," she manages, catching her breath. "Are you at least having fun?"

John grins again, a flash of teeth and bright-eyed sincerity, though he holds up one finger to pause the conversation, and rocks his mallet back along a carefully calculated arc. It's a pot shot, and the blue ball rolls and skips blithely across the lawn, to send its yellow target caroming right up to the edge of the field, near the boundary line but not _quite_ touching. Polite applause follows. "Yeah," he answers cheerfully, though he corrects himself, "As much fun as anyone _can_ have, playing croquet."

"Could you be persuaded to have fun doing something else?" Penelope inquires, casting an eye towards her wayward yellow ball and sighing melodramatically. "It's only that it's rather tiresome, you know, being as bad at croquet as I am."

"Suggestions?"

"There's a duck pond? We can fetch some Melba toast and feed the ducklings." Penelope offers. "Though we'll need to mind the swans."

John's hand goes to his pocket. "We could send Gordon some swans."

" _Brilliant_ ," Penelope agrees immediately, and flits to John's side to take his arm and confiscate the croquet mallet and to pull him off the field. "Game called, we'll say it's a draw."

John (generously) doesn't comment on that, but instead pats his jacket and then rummages in his pockets again, abstracted. " _Probably_ should also get a consult on whether or not it's okay to feed Melba toast to ducklings. Get the go ahead from Captain Planet."

"Whatever you like, John."

He frowns and then glances at his watch, tapping it a few times with his fingertips and squinting, even as he starts to follow her lead. "Did you take my phone?"

"No, dearest. Step!" Penelope commands, before John can trip over a the low wall of shrubbery at the edge of the lawn. "You had it coming out of the maze, I'm sure?" She isn't, actually, having had at least a swallow of every glass of champagne she's provided her companion. "I suppose we haven't heard from Gordon in a while, now that you mention it."

John looks up briefly, back towards the hedge maze and then his attention drops back to his watch. "Mmm…battery maybe ran down, I'm not getting a… _hmm_. I better go look."

"I can have the staff…" Penelope starts, but John shakes his head.

"Nah. Mm. Better not, my phone's…s'got access protocols for TB5, and it's biometrically coded, hell to crack, but not _impossible_ and with _this_ crowd—I'd still better…mm'yeah. Rather nobody else got hold of it. It's probably just back by the fountain, I'll find it."

Penelope catches his elbow before he can make his way across the low swell of the lawn, back towards the entrance of the maze. The way he overbalances slightly and stumbles as she snags him proves her next point, "Darling, you've had six glasses of champagne and you've never been what I'd call _gifted_ , terrestrially. You'll get lost."

"I won't get _lost_ ," John protests, affronted. And then, petulant, "It's a _hedge maze_."

Penelope doesn't let up quite yet. Because for whatever may be true about John's talent for croquet relative to hers, she's got him soundly thrashed when it comes to basic navigation. "And once I had to spend eight hours trying to run you down because you'd gotten lost on the London Underground."

"I knew where I was going."

She sighs, affectionately exasperated. "Yes, and we've been over this time and time again—knowing where you're going matters very little compared to knowing how to get there. I'll come with you."

"Won't. I'll be back in two minutes." John's competitive streak is probably only about two miles wide, compared to Gordon's four, but it's still occasionally possible to catch him out with an issued challenge. He taps his wristwatch a few more times and then lights up, displays it proudly. "Ha! Look. I got a map."

"A map," Penelope repeats. "You've a map of my Great Aunt's hedge maze."

"Well, technically I have an up to the minute series of satellite photographs that I've routed off of TB5's servers and had rendered at a more appropriate resolution, but yeah. Maps. Ish. Lookit, there's us."

Penelope's caught hold of his wrist, peering at a tiny patch of bright green on his watch face, and two tiny specks on the low hill that rolls down to the entrance of the maze, its corridors marked out clearly in dark green relief on the grassy lawn. It's the sort of thing that they'd both catch unholy towering hell for, if Aunt Sylvia ever found out. It's a little tempting to drag him over to show her and watch the family matriarch blow her silvered top. Probably best not. "Good _heavens_ , John."

"You should see what I can do with my phone." He blinks and then looks back down at his watch. "Which I _really_ gotta go get, Pen. I'll be right back. Two minutes. Tops." He flashes another smile and sets off at a measured jog, vanishes beneath the arch at the maze entrance.

"I'll come after you in fifteen!" Penelope calls after him, though she chuckles. It's funny, he must really believe he's not going to get completely and utterly turned round and come out the other side of the maze entirely, without ever once having even glimpsed the fountain at its center. He's only lucky she knows him so well.

She considers going to fetch her own compact from where she's left it, in the car they took to the party. She wants to send Gordon a video of the buffet and find out what would be the best for the ducklings. More importantly, she wants a camera available for when John has to admit that he's been lost in a hedge maze for what, with his luck, will probably be at least an hour. At least it's more fun than croquet.

Penelope turns, and lets out an undignified yelp, face to face with the family matriarch. Aunt Sylvia's expression is one that Penelope's only ever dreamt of emulating, a flinty, ice cold smile that strikes terror into the hearts of all it falls upon. Her eyes are the blue of tempered steel and her gaze seems to have been sharpened precisely to excise secrets.

Penelope hiccups. Then giggles. And then claps a hand over her mouth as she remembers to be _mortified_.

Her cheeks flush bright red. All the bubbles from each and every stolen swallow of champagne come bubbling out at once, bright and airy and breathy, "Aunt Sylvia! It's a _lovely_ party, Aunt Sylvia, we're having the most _wonderful_ time—"

Aunt Sylvia holds up a slice of crystal clear polymer, slightly distorting the hand that holds it. At John's touch, this darkens into usability. In anyone else's hands, it's useless. Penelope has to blink for a few moments before she realizes what she's looking at, and then she's ferreting around in her memory, trying to recall if John happens to have brushed up against any particular member of Aunt Sylvia's staff. "Oh! Oh…"

"I hardly begrudge you a secret affair at your age, Penelope," her aunt tells her, disdain hardening every syllable. "But you've brought some unaffiliated _somebody_ to one of my most intimate private parties, and then the pair of you have gone swanning about the grounds like a pair of drunken _children_ , defying _anybody_ to figure out who the hell he _is_."

Penelope blinks, bewildered. "Aunt Sylvia, I _told_ you who he is," she objects, attempting to be the very picture of innocence, though that was several glasses of champagne ago and suddenly she doubts her memory. "…didn't I?"

Sylvia's off to the races now, an ice age descending with the frost in her tone. "You fed me a load of the most insufferable tripe about him being 'Thunderbird Five'. My _guests_ think he's part of the entertainment. I've had people slipping me handwritten notes with guesses as to his identity all evening. I've had to pretend it'll all come out at the end of the party, because so far Werthers hasn't turned up the slightest indication that he's _anyone at all_." Sylvia's eyes narrow. "Which," she adds, imperious to a fault, "if one _must_ take a lover, their caliber really ought to be worthy of notice by the tabloids _at least_. Not some dimwitted pretty-boy you happened across during some nonsensical American dalliance, kitted up in Armani, and then taught to play croquet."

She mustn't giggle at that, absolutely she mustn't. It would be disastrous. Mortifying, once again, though Penelope's beginning to be surprised by just exactly how much mortification she seems to be able to take.

She snorts, instead.

 _Then_ she giggles.

" _Penelope Catherine Amelia Creighton-Ward_ ," the older woman hisses. "Compose yourself, _at once_."

"Great-Aunt Sylvia! I _shan_ _'t_ ," Penelope fires back, and then it's just peals of laughter, helpless, clutching her aunt's sleeve and all but howling at the absurdity of it all. "My _lover_ ," she chokes, gasping as she gets her breath back between hiccups and giggles. "John Glenn Tracy, dearest old friend from Oxford, colleague and companion and best beloved confidant—my _lover_. Oh, Great-Aunt Sylvia. _No_. Good heavens, absolutely _not_."

"Who _is_ he then?" Aunt Sylvia demands.

And as though to answer for her—and it's precisely the sort of thing she wouldn't put past John—the phone still in Aunt Sylvia's hand begins to trill and chime a sweet, cheerfully chirpy chiptune rendition of Chopin's Minute Waltz. The little polymer tablet darkens, and the screen goes matte, opaque black, against which the IR logo shines perfect, crystal clear white.

"I _told_ you," Penelope explains again, eternally, perfectly patient. "Thunderbird Five."

It's ten minutes, not two, before Thunderbird Five manages to stumble into the middle of the maze. John's not especially bothered, mostly he's glad to be able to look up from his watch, having at one point walked into a hedge he'd mistaken for a shadow on the screen.

But he's made it, just as he'd figured he would, and Penelope's Louboutins still stand tall and elegant next to his loafers at the edge of the fountain. No phone, though. John frowns as he approaches. It's not that he's really worried—the thing's not accessible by anyone without their biometrics logged by IR—but it's irresponsible and imprudent and he'd just rather be with his phone than without it. He approaches the fountain and peers into the water, wondering about refractive indexes and just what exactly the optical properties of his phone are, relative to water. If he had his phone he could look it up.

The watch is probably waterproof, so it's probably not necessary that he takes it off and lays it carefully on the fountain's edge next to Penelope's shoe, but then, while six glasses of champagne may not impair his ability to play croquet, they do rather muddle John's judgment. He shrugs out of his jacket and rolls up the sleeve of his shirt before he carefully reaches into the clear, burbling water of the fountain to see if he can find a five and a half by three inch slice of haptically integrated crystalloid polymer.

If it weren't for the cheerful burble of the fountain, he might've heard the footsteps in the grass behind him, might've had the sense to look up, to glance over his shoulder. Instead, it's a sharp blow to the back of the head, someone grabs him from behind and shoves him face first into the water.


	9. love and the leonids

**love and the leonids**

 _Wherein sleeping arrangements are intimate and the sky seems to fall._

 **DARTMOOR NATIONAL PARK, 2055**

She'd rolled over, turned to face him when she'd first heard the cheerfully insistent beep of his watch alarm, and gotten a sleepy hello in response when she'd softly asked if he was awake. Now they're both just lying next to one another, warm and improbably comfortable. And it's John who breaks the silence.

"You've really never done this before?"

His voice is soft, carefully hushed in the dark, and the whole endeavour thus far has been clumsy, fumbling and endearingly awkward. Mostly because he's entirely too tall.

"Never, darling," Penelope whispers back, because it's the sort of night that seems to call for quiet voices. "I'm glad it's going to be with you."

"Oh, s'my pleasure." John's still drowsy, but waking up. "I just, I guess I find it kind of hard to believe. Really? Never before?"

"It's a question of finding the time, dearest. And the appropriate company."

"But it's the _Leonids_."

This year, the Leonids will reach their peak during the morning of November 18th. It's shortly after two in the morning, and the skies above Dartmoor National Park are perfectly, beautifully clear, better than John could've hoped. It had been Penelope who'd suggested that they make a trip out of it, and so the pair of them had gone on a whirlwind spree for camping supplies, bundled everything into her tiny coupe (the one John's hated for the duration of their friendship for its incompatibility with the length of his legs), and driven four hours out of Oxford.

"Quite frankly, I wouldn't be interested at _all_ if you hadn't been so disappointed after the Percies were rained out. Very excited to see what all the fuss is about."

There's a pause and she can hear the reproof in the cricket-filled silence. " _Perseids_."

She just laughs. "Well, we don't all plan our year around meteorite showers, John."

"Not _ites_ , Penelope," John tells her, at least as earnest as he is pedantic. "They're only meteorites if they make it to the ground. Meteor _oids_ if they're still in space. Meteors while they're burning up." There's a reproachful pause. "And I gave you one for Christmas, I'm sure I explained it then."

"I'm sure I've quite forgotten." Teasing, now, though it sometimes takes John a while to catch on. The meteorite was actually among the best gifts Penelope had ever received; a polished sphere of iron, about the size of a golf ball, and studded with olivine. Ugly and unearthly and beautiful all at once.

Patient, John explains, "The whole point of a meteor shower is that it's a _meteor_ shower—that they burn up so you can see them."

"Oh, is that the point?"

"Well, no, I phrased that poorly. There's no particular purpose inherent to a meteor shower, we just happen to be alive and around and available to experience the periodic phenomenon of cosmic debris interacting with the planet's atmosphere at certain points in the year. Call it a happy coincidence."

"But it'll be pretty, though."

"Yes, it'll be pretty."

"I _suppose_ that will do."

There's a quality they have in common in being two uncommonly clever people, who occasionally amuse themselves by playing dumb as though it's the same thing as playing chess, only there's no last move, just an ongoing game that they drift in and out of. There's a subtle transition back to sincerity as John cautions, "Don't turn any lights on, remember, you don't want to ruin your night vision. We're lucky that the moon's down already."

It's a different sort of darkness than Penelope's used to, and there's a rustling of fabric, a zipper coming undone and then John sits up. He shuffles to the zippered front of the tent on his hands and knees, opens it halfway. The space they're sharing fills with a chill November breeze and the very faintest shine of starlight. John coughs, then carefully scoots back to sit cross-legged on his sleeping bag. Penelope yawns and nestles more snugly inside her own. As an afterthought, she says, "Thank you for not being tedious about the tent arrangement."

"Well, less to carry," John answers back and as her eyes begin to adjust she can see his silhouette in profile against the faint light through the nylon walls. "And it's warmer. And there's nothing to be tedious about."

Penelope smiles to herself. Camping overnight in the middle of a field, alone but for the company of the tall, handsome son of a multibillionaire industrialist—sharing a _tent_ , in fact—Penelope can imagine a great number of people who would make themselves _tremendously_ tedious about the whole situation.

But John's interesting, that way. A year of friendship, and sometimes that's still the most interesting thing about him.

"Did you sleep?" Penelope inquires.

"Sort of. I'm excited. And you snore."

She gasps, scandalized. "I _don_ _'t_! I _do not snore_ , John Tracy. You _beast_. What a thing to say!"

Her eyes are adjusting and she can see him crack a smile. Another rustle of nylon as he fishes for his phone. "Don't tempt me to prove it. You sleeptalk, too."

Wide-awake now, Penelope sits up and pulls her hair out of its messy braid, shakes it loose over her shoulder and then twists it back up into a ponytail. "Blackmail is not a game you want to play with me, John," she declares.

"I thought that's what friends were for."

It's taken the entire duration of their friendship to get used to John's sense of humour, and sometimes it _still_ soars over her head. Even as she laughs, she's not certain if it was actually a joke. Because it's times like these that she realizes that _he_ hasn't realized just how different he is from the sort of people she usually calls friends.

More small talk, more amiable banter, and by half past two they've both pulled on extra layers against the chill of November, acquired a thermos full of hot tea and a sleeping bag to lie on, and made their way to a nearby rise of earth, the slope of a hill that faces the southern sky. Penelope has stolen a few glances skyward, but hasn't had the luck to catch sight of a meteor yet.

They settle down on the side of the hill, one of the sleeping bags spread out on the thick, springy grass. Her eyes are nearly used to the dark, and the stars overhead are bright, beautiful. John's quiet, but that's nothing new, and as they both get comfortable, it's just a long stretch of companionable silence. For a while, it's fine. But within a minute or two Penelope's beginning to wonder what exactly she's suppose to be looking for. it begins to seem tremendously silly, lying awake in the middle of a field in the middle of the night, in the cold and the dark, hoping to catch a glimpse of what can't possibly amount to more than a little streak of light in the darkness. She's beginning to feel quite foolish and resolves to say something on the subject.

—only then the first falling star arcs across the sky, and in spite of herself, surprised, Penelope gasps with genuine pleasure and seizes John's hand in her excitement. "Oh! Did you see? _Oh_! And another one!"

John laughs softly and she squeezes his fingers, delighted. "Yeah, I saw. See? I knew you'd enjoy it."

And it's funny, with her breath puffing in clouds, whisked away in the breeze, with her gaze turned towards the heavens—Penelope realizes that she _appreciates_ this. That something about this is lovely and perfect and _real_ , some sudden moment of deep connection with the wind and the sky and the darkness all around. She doesn't dare take her eyes from the tapestry of stars overhead, lest she miss another meteor, and she doesn't quite notice that she hasn't let go of John's hand.

A third, then a fourth. Fifth, sixth, seventh through tenth in quick succession. She picks up the embarrassing and amateurish habit of pointing after she sees them, obviously always too late, and John chuckles at her. There's no particular rhythm or pattern to them, try as she might to discern one, though John points out the stars that make up Leo, and tells her that's the part of the sky she wants to watch.

Enough time passes that she loses count of the falling stars. She finds herself thinking of the way he'd chosen to frame the event—as a lucky collusion of places and times and people and phenomena, that the pair of them were lucky even to exist to see something like a meteor shower, and exist to see it together. About the way people move through one another's spheres, interacting only briefly in the grand scheme of things, and that she wouldn't be here, in this moment, seeing this happen, if it weren't for him. She thinks about this for long enough that she begins to feel the need to say something.

"...John?"

"Oh, good, thought you might've fallen asleep."

"No, not likely. I'm quite awake. I just...I suppose I've never done anything like this before. It's lovely, John, really it is, and I wanted to thank you. Thank you for thinking I might enjoy it."

His fingers twitch slightly, a flutter of movement confined in her hand, and if her mind weren't elsewhere, Penelope's exquisitely calibrated sense about people might have caught the slight note of wariness in his tone, the vaguest hint of discomfort. "Oh, sure, well. Yeah. I mean, I think anybody would, really. I can't imagine anybody being here and seeing this and _not_ loving it. What friends are for, I guess."

"I suppose. And yet I've never had a friend quite like you before, John," Penelope remarks, still abstracted. Another uncounted meteor arcs across the sky and she smiles to herself before continuing, "Because I've absolute hordes of friends, you realize. Scads of them. Friends from school and the children of friends of my father and friends who are really just people with whom I happen to share a social class—and it's not even been a year and yet somehow you're altogether different. _We_ _'re_ different, I suppose, you _and_ I. Because you bring out a side of me that I...well. I quite like it, really, I feel rather more myself around you, and it's in a way I really haven't, not in a very long time."

"Oh. Uh. That's nice, I guess."

"I hope it's mutual. And I suppose perhaps I wonder if this mightn't be something more. Is that strange?"

"Dunno."

A one word answer should be a clue, the shortness of his voice, the way he doesn't turn to look at her. And maybe these are all things she perceives and then chooses to ignore, shifting onto her side to face him, ignoring the stars overhead. Possibly she's going to step beyond the bounds of his neatly walled-in comfort zone, but then, he's also the reason that she's lying in a field beneath the stars, well beyond the bounds of her own. "Can I ask you something?"

"I guess."

Well, there's no way in the world she could fail to notice the reticence now. But then, Penelope's always been terribly fortunate not to care unduly about other people's feelings.

"What do you suppose would happen if I told you I love you?"

Another star falls in the few long moments of silence. Neither of them see it.

And then his hand jerks abruptly out of her grasp and John sits up beside her, and suddenly the air seems to have gone quite a great deal colder, but of course it's only the wind, filling in the space he's left empty. "I guess it would probably severely interfere with my ability to enjoy the Leonids."

"Why?"

"Because we're meant to be friends." He lays the slightest accusation on the word _friends_ , as though she's violated some unwritten contract by adding the word love into the equation. This is a point upon which they wholeheartedly disagree, and just haven't had the chance to argue about yet.

"I can't love you as a friend?"

"You barely know me."

Again with the accusation, although this is—at least in Penelope's view—blatantly untrue, but she'll play along with the conclusion. "I suppose I should like to get to know you a great deal better, then."

He doesn't answer. John's shifted over to the edge of the blanket, and in the silence she can hear the soft sound of grass being torn up by its roots, or its stems snapping at a hundred small points of thoughtless violence. There are nervous habits about John, sometimes, a tendency to find some part of his environment and either put it into or take it out of order—it's something she finds tremendously endearing, though sometimes a little bit sad.

If she and John play dumb like it's playing chess, then occasionally Penelope plays John like a game of solitaire, stacking up cards in a careful sequence, sorting everything out into patterns of behaviour that she's realized he may not actually perceive. She's gone and shuffled the deck now, a brand new order, an intersection of words and people and time and space, a game she's playing because it's one she wants to win. "The year's going to end. You'll come to the end of your time in England and we'll part ways, and if the outset of our relationship is anything to go by, then there'll be very little from your end as far as keeping up with me. For a while I think I should try to keep in touch, but I feel like absent a formal social setting necessary to keep you in my company, then we would fall out of contact with each other. All I mean to tell you is that I've gotten very fond of you, and I would miss having you in my life."

For as clever as he is—and he's easily the cleverest person she knows—she's come to understand that he's made himself deliberately dumb in the place where she's the smartest; about people, and the ways they interact with one another. And while solitaire isn't really a gambler's game, Penelope's still willing to bet that he'd miss her too.

She doesn't get a chance to press the point. He pushes himself to his feet without a further word and walks away, striding quickly up and over the hill behind them. She's a little too startled at first to do anything but sit up and call his name. For all the brightness of the starlight, it's still deeply dark—darker than anywhere she's been in a long time. And now, for reasons she doesn't entirely understand, she finds herself alone.


	10. terms and conditions

**terms and conditions**

 _Wherein positions are clarified and stars get uncrossed._

 **DARTMOOR NATIONAL PARK, 2055**

It doesn't matter where he's gone; whether he's holed himself up in his room, or had to tactfully extract himself from some high-stakes social encounter, or just picked up and left—somehow in this situation, John always finds himself back in his big brother's company, being lectured.

 _Your problem is that you never make friends with anybody, first. That_ _'s what you're doing wrong._

It's long been John's thoroughly and carefully considered opinion that he's _not_ , actually, doing anything wrong. It's an opinion he's tried time and time again to harden and cure into an incontrovertible fact. Somehow it never quite seems to work.

 _I mean, so you_ _'re a bit of an introvert. Okay, so that's a bit of an understatement. My point is, you wouldn't get put in this position all the time if you were a little more receptive to getting to know people._

It's funny, how this conversation with Scott always plays back over in his head, in moments like these. Lately he's gotten very good at not _having_ moments like these, but the memory's still sharp as ever. It's like some sort of anti-catalytic agent that's gotten mixed into his own deeply held views, and prevented them from solidifying into a bedrock of personal truth.

 _So someone stops you in the hallway, asks you out for coffee. So there_ _'s another note in your locker, and you pretend like you never got it. So you get propositioned out of nowhere and it always blindsides you—but I mean...you're obviously available. You're passably attractive, even with the redhead thing. We're rich as_ _**fuck.**_ _So it_ _'s gonna happen. That's just how it goes. You'd do yourself a favour if you at least learned how to be gracious about it. People always come away with the impression that you're kind of a bastard, and then it comes back around to bite you in the ass._

Scott probably hadn't meant for the overall takeaway of his generous big brotherly advice to total up to "be a bastard", but even if it had, being a bastard—or being quiet and standoffish and socially unavailable—hasn't ever actually seemed to help. It hasn't ever staved off the interests of anyone who'd bull past his barriers, operating under the assumption that he's just misunderstood, and then proceeding to misunderstand him. And beyond that spectacular failure of tactics, John's never understood is why just _being explicit_ doesn't seem to work. He always ends up being told he doesn't know what he's talking about.

 _Like, people just don_ _'t think there's any other avenue. So, okay, you say you're not interested in relationships—probably what you mean is you don't like being approached by strangers. That's fine. Nobody does. But you're just...you're really bad at giving anybody a chance at the intermediate steps._

According to Scott—and John's peripherally aware of just enough about Scott's modus operandi to be reasonably sure that his brother would know what he's talking about—your basic relationship proceeds along a linear social path.

Strangers.

Acquaintances.

Friends.

(At this stage Scott allows for the possibility of a plateau of friendship that comes with the essentially quoted "benefits". Or, possibly, just better friends.)

But, ideally, from the basic premise of friendship, the next stop is the horrifically ambiguous: _more_ than friends.

And then, inevitably: lovers.

 _That_ _'s just the way people_ _**work**_ _John._

This is not—hasn't ever been—the way John works.

Of course, the way John works has him alone, in the dark, on the chilly and windward side of a hill in Dartmoor, huddled up and sullen and hoping against hope that Penelope doesn't come after him. So maybe there's some room for optimization there.

Or maybe it's just another night to contend with the possibility of dysfunction, brokenness; of something being fundamentally flawed in the way he'd like to be able move through life.

 _Johnny, I_ _'m not saying you're wrong to be bothered by people coming on so strong, but you gotta admit, you bring it on yourself._

He still doesn't want to think that's true, but Scott had always seemed so sure of the fact. And, mentally rearranging the context of the evening so far, it's starting to seem stupidly, blindingly obvious that he's gone and set himself up for another fall.

Only, John never seems to be the one who does the falling in these situations. So he's not sure why ending up in this place always feels like rock bottom.

There's a rustling in the grass behind him, and then the sweep of a beam of bright LED light. He freezes, resists the urge to curse.

"John?"

The November grass is coarse, scrubby. He's only noticed now because his hands have clenched two fistfuls of it, his knuckles brushing against the dirt at the roots, frost up from the ground chilling his fingers. He doesn't say anything, keeps perfectly still. Hopes that he radiates the desire for her to _go away_.

But it does no good, because he can hear her, slightly out of breath, as she comes clambering carefully down the hill, and drops to sit in the grass next to him. John refuses to look at her and Penelope allows a few moments of silence to pass. Then she clears her throat and sighs. "I'm sorry," she says softly. "John? I'm sorry, I didn't think I would upset you."

He doesn't have anything to say that won't sound childish or petulant, nothing that doesn't always make him feel stupid in these situations, or at fault, somehow. Like Scott says, he's probably brought it on himself. Led her on in some way he had neither perceived nor intended and led her to believe that the sort of confession she's just made is one he would welcome.

There's the soft sound of her hand brushing across the grass, and then she finds his hand, closes her fingers around his before he can pull away. She squeezes gently, though her touch makes his skin crawl and he jerks his hand out of her grip. She doesn't try again. And then, "John, please talk to me."

"Why?" John's aware that he sounds sullen, but it's better than sounding hurt. On the balance of it, he'd far rather be angry than hurt, and that shouldn't be too hard. He reaches for anger, finds justifiable irritation, belligerence, betrayal. "Why, why should I? Clearly you don't _listen_." Not, of course, that anyone's _ever_ listened, but he'd at least been hopeful about Penelope. For so long she'd seemed as though she'd just understood, without him ever having to say anything.

"I've always tried rather hard to listen to you, actually," Penelope says quietly, and she's drawn her knees up, wrapped her arms around them. "I did hope you might care enough to return the favour."

This seems horrifically unjust, considering that the breadth and depth of their friendship has mostly consisted of Penelope, prattling on about this or that, and expecting to be listened to. It had even been something she'd helpfully listed at the outset of everything, when she'd told him what she expected out of their friendship.

But then, that's the crux of the problem. Because there'd also been an agreement struck at the outset of their relationship. _His_ only condition, and one that had been laid out in clear, simple terms. That this was never supposed to _go anywhere_. Penelope's only supposed to _pretend_ to be stupid, and the part of him that knows she isn't, actually, is offended at the deception and doubly offended at the betrayal. Hurt, too, though he's hardly going to give her that satisfaction.

Of course, the way to hurt Penelope right back is by ignoring her, refusing to engage. He's learned that, in their nine months, that it's attention she feeds on. That had been her first big victory, getting his attention, and then parlaying that into this farce of a friendship. John's well aware of his own capacity for bias, and in the back of his brain he's already running through the whole of their history and editing his feelings in retroactively. Assigning suspicion and revulsion and betrayal to every time she'd stood too close or casually touched him, every instance of thoughtless affection. The constant demands on his time and his company, the insistence on parting hugs and kisses. All the pet names, every instance of "pet" and "dearest" and "darling" and "love". All the times he'd paid her too much attention, and had extended her too much credit in the arena of sticking to his terms.

Minutes tick by, and he lets them. Relishes them, even, takes a certain vindictive pleasure in her continued silence. Depriving Penelope of words is like depriving her of oxygen, gives her nothing to spark off of, nothing to work with.

Except—

Well, _she_ _'s_ not saying anything either. And immediately he's annoyed by _that_ , too, because the silent treatment isn't really as effective if she's depriving him of anything to deliberately not respond to. So he sneaks a glance sideways, eyes long adjusted to the dark, to see if that provokes a reaction.

He's not ready to see the starlight glistening on her cheeks, not expecting the soft sniffle and the way she wipes her nose on the back of her hand. He's _especially_ not ready for the way she turns and meets his gaze, stares right back, defiant and unashamed about the fact that this is the first time John's ever seen her cry.

Hardly the first time he's _made_ anyone cry, in situation like this. But there's an unexpectedly sharp pang of regret, the sort of empathy reserved for the people he hurts without meaning to—the sort he's mostly managed to cut off at the source. This is just a spark he needs to step on, to stamp out immediately, before it can catch into something that takes him up in a blaze of self-recrimination and doubt.

Against his better judgement, despite the fact that John's almost certain this is a trap, something about the fact that she's got tears streaking her cheeks makes him pause. And then, damningly, without even meaning to— "...Penny?"

She sniffles again and waves a hand, gives a watery little chuckle and shakes her head. "Oh, are you interested now? In how I might feel? I suppose it was fairly stupid of me to think you _were_ listening. You've always been a self-absorbed bastard, John Tracy, and I suppose it's my own fault for liking you anyway."

That's better. Brings a hot flush of embarrassment, anger, rushing back. "Look, I never...I thought you understood. You were _supposed_ to understand, you _said_ you understood. _Just friends_. It's not _my_ fault that you—"

Penelope flares suddenly and fires right back, cuts him off, "Would you _stop_? Please, would you stop and...and...if we were ever friends at all, if I wasn't wrong about that, would you _listen_? Please, _please_ would you just let me talk and promise you'll listen?"

He shouldn't do that. John _knows_ he shouldn't do that, because this is a trick and a trap and she's preying on him, playing to a softer side that no one's supposed to know he _has_ , when he works so hard at being such a standoffish, unapproachable bastard. What he _should_ do is get up and leave. Just go, just leave, it's hardly the worst situation he's walked out of. So he's in the middle of a national park and it's November and he has a terrible sense of direction, it's not _that_ cold. And it can't be _that_ long til dawn.

Fuck.

So instead he huffs irritably, breath puffing in the November air, and says, "...Fine."

"Thank you," she answers, and then there's another long pause. When she finally does seem to decide what to say, her voice remains small, almost tentative, as she starts, "I was only trying to be genuine, saying...what I said. But I don't think you were listening to me, because I don't think I said what you must've heard." She pauses and then, "But, you know, I can honestly say _that_ , too. I've _been_ in love with you, John."

She can't possibly understand the way that makes his entire body—his entire _self_ —cringe, flinching away. Penelope continues regardless, either indifferent or oblivious. She's pulled her legs up closer against her chest, huddled up and hunched over, staring out into the darkness. Something about her tone makes her sound almost as though she's talking to herself and he's just being permitted to listen in. Something about that makes him listen a little closer.

"—but I fall in love at least half a dozen times a day, you realize. I was in love with you the first time I saw you, because you were handsome and quiet and sat all alone, and I liked your glasses and I thought you looked sad. And then ten minutes later there was a new assistant professor in my maths class, and I was in love with _him_ , instead. Then...oh, probably anyone who smiled at me on the way back to my flat. Or the barista who put a heart on the top of my latte. And then probably you again, at least a few more times, before I got to know you."

Penelope's told him a great deal about herself, in the course of their relationship. But this is the first time John thinks he's heard anything that's diminished his respect for her—that she'd be so frivolous, so cavalier about such an invasion. That she'd act like it doesn't matter, that she can't _help_ it—

"... _how_?" He manages not to sound completely repulsed, but it's a near thing. And he knows her well enough to know she can tell.

Penelope shrugs. "I don't know. It's just...moments, really. Fleeting little bright spots of light, when one sees a person and just—some glimpse of what they might be like, if you were able to be close to them. Spinning some little gesture or quirk or quality into a daydream about having a whole life together. It doesn't do any harm. I rarely do anything about it. I just like to have those little moments, just for myself."

Before he can tell her that he doesn't understand, she presses on, and steals the words before he can say them himself, "But I know you don't understand that, and I'm not asking you to. It's just—I suppose I want you to understand that I _know_ the difference. Between loving someone and being in love with them. And I'm not _in love_ with you now, John. I promise. I _do_ understand that you don't want that. You told me you didn't and I've always understood."

The worst part is that it's tempting to believe her. She sounds so sincere, and she's teasing something he's always _wanted_ , but long given up on hoping for. John's still hurting, still wary, and a part of him still believes that the promise of understanding is just the bait in the trap. So he's still cautious, still a little bit hostile as he says, "I don't know why I should believe you."

"No, I suppose you've no reason to." Penelope sighs and the sound gets lost in the rising wind, the chill that makes her shiver and makes him regret that they both have to be here, having this stupid conversation, in the middle of the night, in the middle of November. "I _was_ trying to be careful, you know. I just wanted to talk about it. I didn't realize you'd be so upset. I certainly didn't think you'd just _leave_."

It's dark enough that she probably can't see his face flush slightly, embarrassed. It had, after all, been a fairly pathetic escape plan. "...yeah. Well." But he doesn't really have anything to follow that, it had been a childish action, and fairly indefensible. "I don't know. Just...being a bastard."

Penelope unlocks her arms from where she'd locked them around her knees, and shifts ever so slightly closer. "I didn't think you were being a bastard. I just didn't understand, right at first, what it might have sounded like. I thought I'd been clear. Obviously I wasn't."

John shrugs in his turn, more embarrassed by the minute. "Look, I...it's just...it felt like a trap. This just...this happens to me and I always feel so fucking _stupid_ whenever it does. Because I should know better. Because people've been doing this to me since I was _twelve_ and no one _gets_ it and I...Christ. God, I just...I thought you were different."

"...mightn't I be?" Another hesitant pause and then she scoots a little closer, and nudges his arm with her elbow. "Mightn't _we_ be? Because I meant it, John, I've _never_ had a friend like you. And I don't think you've ever had a friend like _me_ , either. I don't know how or why it's happened, but you mean the world to me. I care about you, and it seemed...it just seemed like the time to say so. And I did mean it. But I know better than to jeopardize our friendship by being _in love_ with you, John." This time he glances down to catch her slight, wry smile, as she says, "Whatever you might think, I know you too well, and I love you too much for that."

There's another pearl of wisdom from Scott, waiting in the wings.

 _What_ _'s so wrong with someone loving you, anyway? Most people hope their whole lives for someone to love, and someone who loves them back. You never even try. Don't be such a bastard, John._

Maybe he's accidentally stumbled across a loophole, in The Way People Work, according to Scott Tracy. Maybe that plateau with the wink-and-a-nudge "benefits" has another dimension to it, maybe there's room for interpretation of the word "benefits". Maybe friends are better than brothers, for this sort of thing, and maybe he'd benefit from finding out. He's never been able to talk about this with Scott. But he's starting to wonder if maybe he can talk about it with Penelope.

John hasn't got the first idea of _how_ to talk about this with Penelope. But she's also far better at this than he's ever been.

So.

This time, he's the one who reaches down, careful and still uncertain, to take her hand. Her fingers are cold, and he hopes his are warmer. John shifts to his knees and then stands up, gives her hand a slight tug to help her to her feet. "We should talk," he concludes, still a little spooked, but resolved to try. He looks a little sheepishly around the windward side of the hill. "Maybe not here."

"The tea's still hot and the stars are still falling," Penelope offers, and her hand squeezes his fingers again, an eager little gesture of hope. "And I do adore talking to you, John. I want so badly for us to stay friends." She pauses, and adds hastily, "Just friends."

Well.

John's still new at this, but he _had_ been listening. He's always actually kind of liked listening to Penelope, if sometimes only to catch her out when she's wrong about something. It represents a new sort of moment between them, that he pulls his hand away from hers, and carefully puts an arm around her shoulders, instead. "Mm. Maybe more than 'just friends'. Maybe you were right about that."


	11. watson and adler

**watson and adler**

 _Wherein a call is answered and a brief threeway catfight occurs._

 **A Garden Party, 2060**

She's spared further interrogation by her great-aunt by the need to answer the call coming in to John's phone. It takes her a moment to work out just exactly _how_ , and standing just outside the entrance to her Aunt's hedgemaze, the cheerful 8-bit tones of The Minute Waltz still emanating from the impenetrable little device.

Penelope would like to think it's a testament to their friendship that it's even possible for her to answer John's phone, but in actuality it's a testament to the fact that her biometrics are logged with all of the devices that IR uses in a personal and professional capacity. She can answer John's phone because John's phone has a logged copy of her fingerprints, and she's been preemptively ID'd and approved by whomever is calling. She's not sure who _would_ be calling, though she suspects it's probably Gordon. She needs to remember to ask him if they can feed Melba toast to the ducklings.

Only when she taps a fingertip on the shimmering logo at the center of the screen, the I and the R of the IR logo break apart into fragments, and then spin circles of light that resolve themselves into an avatar, a ring of white lights.

And the voice that greets her is ambiguously young, artificially female, and genuinely churlish.

"Lady Creighton-Ward," EOS says, in a tone as glacial as anything Great-Aunt Sylvia has ever employed. "This is not your comm."

Oh, bother.

Penelope tries to keep well-apprised of the list of people who hate her. Despite John's insistence to the contrary, she remains fairly certain that EOS is on this list. Possibly near the top.

"It's not that she _hates_ you." John had been very careful, very deliberate in how he went about explaining it. It had been a week after EOS' arrival in John's life before Penelope had gotten a chance to speak to him privately again. He'd been off rotation and sat cross-legged on the bed in his rarely used bedroom back on the island. "Umm. The opposite, actually. Maybe. Probably, even! I think maybe you're like her Irene Adler."

Their joint affection for Sherlock Holmes entirely aside, Penelope hadn't been reassured. She'd been entirely skeptical, in fact. " _Me_. Why _me_? _You_ _'re_ the one who beat her—who are _you_ supposed to be in this scenario?"

Half the world away, John had shrugged, a little sheepish. "I think for the first time in my life, I might be Watson."

Penelope had given an offended little gasp as a fundamental tenet of her and John's friendship had seemed to burst into a whiff of smoke. " _I_ _'m_ supposed to be Watson."

John had only laughed. "Well, not to _her_ you're not. I thought you'd appreciate the comparison. I meant it in the best possible way. It's...I mean, you got around her. You figured out something you weren't supposed to, you weren't fooled by what had fooled everybody else. You know me too well, and you were the exception. So she doesn't hate you. She probably holds you in a very particular sort of high esteem."

Penelope doesn't feel held in particularly high esteem at the moment, as the aperture of EOS' avatar shrinks down, like an eye narrowing at her, and the AI asks, "Do you know where John is?"

There's something about interacting with EOS that always makes Penelope feel as though she's being entrapped, somehow, and that every question is a trick question. "He went to find his phone," she answers, neatly avoiding the technicality of the question and trying to keep her tone bright and positive. "We've been having a lovely time," she adds, hoping that the relative loveliness of the time John's having might go some small distance towards softening EOS' attitude.

It does not. "Leaving entirely aside the fact that you're the one who _has_ his phone, I am currently tracking three separate devices in three separate locations, all of which are meant to correlate to John's position. The most reliable of _these_ is currently travelling at seventy-five miles per hour, northward up the M1. I am interested to hear your explanation."

It's with a sudden drop in the pit of her stomach that she apprehends this information, and exclaims, "...he's _what_?"

"I take that to be an answer to my first question, then."

She'd just _known_ he was going to get lost, but this is _egregious_ , even by the standard to which she holds John Tracy's sense of direction. This might just mean that something's gone terribly wrong.

Aunt Sylvia has watched this exchange silently, icy eyes glittering, and now she rounds upon her great-niece and Penelope finds herself caught in the frigid space between two cold fronts. "Penelope, who the devil is this child supposed to be?"

EOS takes the liberty of fielding this question. "I am Thunderbird Five," she answers primly. "And I imagine you think everyone is a child, but I also assume that this is just a delusional manifestation of your extremely advanced age."

" _I beg your pardon_?"

Penelope's got more pressing problems than a brewing catfight between her seething great aunt and her best friend's bratty AI sidekick. Notably the fact that her best friend is not where he's supposed to be. That her best friend is, apparently, proceeding very quickly _away_ from where he was supposed to be. She cuts in before either party can take another shot at the other, "EOS, are you quite sure? He only...he went into the hedge maze, he thought he'd left his phone by the fountain." Penelope deliberately doesn't mention that his phone had apparently been nicked on Aunt Sylvia's orders, and that this is the only reason Penelope had been the one to answer it. "...can you check again?" she asks a little lamely.

"I am monitoring his position as we speak." There's a frigid silence and then, "If any harm has befallen my friend and partner during his tenure in _your_ company, then I can assure you the consequences _will be unpleasant_."

It's probably at least partially the champagne, but this brings a flare of warm indignation to Penelope's cheeks and her tone is heated, as she retorts, "He was my friend long before he was _yours_ , and if he's in trouble now, then _you_ _'re_ hardly fixed to do anything about it. Dealing with _you_ is already unpleasant enough, as far as consequences of things that have befallen John. _I_ _'ve_ never tried to _murder him_."

There's a pause, and then the avatar on the screen is replaced by a straight white line, an equalizer. And Penelope's own voice plays back: "I ought to drown you in the fountain, John Tracy."

Well, _that_ _'s_ just—she's—Penelope's aware that she's gaping, scandalized and horrified—"You've been _listening in_ , this _entire time_ ," she sputters, flustered and affronted in a way she never is. It's one of her worst fears in the world, being bugged. "You—!"

Before EOS can make any further comment, before Penelope can formulate something to say, Great Aunt Sylvia intervenes. She plucks John's phone neatly from Penelope's fingers, and drops it onto the grass. From somewhere about her person she produces a neat, snub-nosed little pistol and fires three sharp, staccato shots that make Penelope shriek and jump backward. John's phone is left a sparking, shattered mess of nanocircuitry and clear polymer.

"Penelope," Aunt Sylvia begins, and there's a deceptive smoothness to her tone, something silken and subtle and oh so terribly dangerous. "What in the devil's name is going on?"

And Penelope cringes in a way that's both unbecoming and entirely unlike her, because she doesn't actually _know_. They'd been having such fun and everything had been so lovely, but now— "I'm not entirely sure" she admits. And then, miserable and anxious, and effectively cowed by the imperious tone her great-aunt has taken, she can't help but exclaim, " _Oh_ , I don't know. I've got the most dreadful feeling that something's gone terribly wrong and I think...I think John might be in trouble."

This is received with a flat stare and a slight sigh. "I think we've passed beyond the realm of 'might be', child. _Seventy-five miles per hour up the M1_." Aunt Sylvia gives her a coolly appraising once-over and then proceeds to sum up the situation in question, "This _is_ John Tracy, then. You're not messing me about, and he's really one of your friends from college. Oxford. And my man Werthers has turned up _utterly nothing_ about his identity because...?"

Penelope shrugs, abashed, and realizing it wouldn't really have done any harm to give her aunt at least a heads up about John, before arriving. She really has been terribly childish and there's utterly no excuse. "He's very private. It's the sort of thing he'd _do_ —the sort of thing he _could do_ —scrub his identity out of anywhere he didn't want it found."

Great Aunt Sylvia's eyebrow arches and Penelope wilts a little further. "His identity as John Tracy, one of the heirs to Tracy Industries, one of _the_ global powers in aerospace technology in the world today, and the _billions_ of dollars implied by that inheritance?"

Penelope's not sure she likes where this is going. "Yes."

"In addition, you tell me that he's _also_ the operator of _Thunderbird Five_ , one of the most powerful private satellites operating in the orbit today? Which is a detail of his existence that really should remain as closely guarded as possible, given the fact that he occupies a position of incredible power as a day job."

Oh, _no_.

Penelope's beginning to see her aunt's point, and her shoulders drop under the burden of the mistake she's made, in thinking this was a place where they could both safely pretend to be the people they were in college, before espionage and International Rescue, before FAB1 and Thunderbird 5.

Because she's brought John _here_. Into an occasion that looks like a garden party, but which is really a gathering of international agents from every corner of the globe, in various states of activity and retirement and all the shades in between. She's teased them all with an anonymous stranger, clearly deep in her confidences and intimate in her company, and thumbed her nose at everyone present, by bringing John into the company of people whose lives revolve around the discovery of secrets.

That does it. Penelope hangs her head and stares at her shoes and feels like an absolute fool. "I'm sorry, Aunt Sylvia," she murmurs. "I...I suppose I didn't think that there'd be anyone really _dangerous_ here. It's always just been a party with your friends, I thought—"

"Penelope, dearest, there's not a single person here who I'd be foolish enough to mistake for a _friend_. And it's beginning to seem very likely that I may in fact have invited an _enemy_." Great Aunt Sylvia shakes her head, "And it seems as though it's your friend who might suffer for it."

Her anguish must tell in her expression, because before Penelope can say anything, her aunt sighs and in defiance of all odds, softens slightly. She even offers a motherly pat on Penelope's shoulder. "And he _is_ your friend, and that's the worst of it, isn't it? That you _were_ just hoping to have a lovely time and behave like children. Honestly, darling. Friends are preciously hard to come by in this line of work, and you really ought to know better than to bring one of yours _here_."

Her arm loops around Penelope's and she tugs her niece along, taking the situation over. "Come along, child. Whatever's happened, we'll fetch him back. Northward up the M1, I believe, was what that beastly child said on the phone? I'll have Werthers bring the car around, and we'll sort this out the old fashioned way."


	12. bill and terry

**bill and terry**

 _Wherein terms are defined and a pursuit is undertaken._

 **Northward Along the M1, 2060**

They don't know that he's Thunderbird Five.

They don't _seem_ to know that he's John Tracy, either, second son of one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the world, and the heir to billions of ransomable dollars.

They've _somehow_ come away with the impression that he's the Lady Penelope's _fiance_ , and this is so glaringly inaccurate that it makes John nauseous.

Though admittedly, that may have more to do with the fact that he's been blindfolded and gagged and stuffed in the trunk of a car, with his forearms pretzeled behind his back and his wrists duct taped together. Or that he's on the drunker side of tipsy. Or that he seems to be traveling at a speed that seems as though it shouldn't be achievable outside the bounds of low earth orbit.

Caviar and croquet and charming company.

And kidnapping, apparently. The kidnapping had not been advertised, when he was being invited to this particular party.

Right.

Still, not the worst party Penny's ever dragged him to. In the top five, surely. But not quite the worst.

Weighing up the quality of the party, all things considered, John's a little bit insulted by the quality of the kidnappers. If he's honest, he kind of thinks he'd be a little less roughly treated if he'd managed a name drop. If they knew who he was, they'd probably be embarrassed by just how shoddily this whole thing is being handled.

It's still probably good that they _don't_ know who he is, but he at least might have gotten a seat up front, if they did.

As it stands, the trunk of the car reeks of gasoline and he's lying on a tire iron. He's dizzy and nauseous and aware that if he throws up, he'll probably choke to death and die in a manner both ignominious and embarrassing for someone who lives a death-defying existence in _space_.

And there's not a hell of a lot he can do about the situation.

Still. If the quality of his kidnappers is questionable, the quality of the company he's left behind is of the sort that's not about to let him get _kidnapped_.

Pen will be along any minute now, surely.

If they haul him out of the trunk of the car before _she_ does, and he gets the chance to say anything, the only thing he can think of is, "Just _wait_ 'til my girlfriend gets here."

Which, while subject to a certain degree of interpretation, isn't strictly untrue.

Aunt Sylvia drives like it's going out of vogue, because it is.

It's _gauche_ , really, to own a vehicle. Even a vehicle as sleek and stunning and classy as Aunt Sylvia's little silvery grey coupe. It seats only two people and Penelope had felt it would be rather unwise to point out the fact that they're not going to have anywhere to _put_ John, even if they catch up to him.

When they catch up to him, rather.

Because it's just a mathematical certainty now, because he's _stopped_. He's about thirty miles distant, but they're closing that distance rapidly, and it shouldn't be much more than twenty minutes before they catch up.

EOS had frostily informed Penelope and her aunt of John's location, and that he'd stopped moving, and that if the _reason_ he'd stopped moving was because someone had cut his locator out and ditched it somewhere, then she would personally take over every available system within a two hundred mile radius and start a search of her own.

Penelope had needed to engage in some rather unattractive begging in order to convince the AI of the reasons this would be a bad idea, and now they have a deadline of a single solitary hour to locate John, or Thunderbird Five will go full-rogue, and plunge the entirety of the British Isles into a state of high surveillance until he's found.

Aunt Sylvia changes gears and the little coupe goes that much faster. It's in this moment that she seems to decide she needs to ask an awkward question. "So," she asks, as the speedometer climbs ever higher and the M1 dissolves away behind them, "why 'just friends' with the second son of an industrial empire worth _billions_? Is it because he's too tall? Or is it because he's so offensively _ginger_? Because there are ways around _that_ , my darling, and he'd make a _charming_ blond."

Penelope just heaves an exasperated sigh in answer.

John has a headache.

Technically two headaches.

Their names are Bill and Terry.

By their powers combined, Bill and Terry are probably going to total up into a migraine that knocks John flat on his ass for the next forty-eight hours.

If they were remotely competent at the kidnapping business, he's reasonably sure that he wouldn't know their names are Bill and Terry, and yet...

He doesn't know the exact parameters of Bill and Terry's brilliant plan, but it appears to come to its terminus in an old abandoned barn down an old country lane. John has to fight down the urge to inquire if Bill and Terry are secretly Luddites, and thus unaware of the extent of technology used to locate people these days. There's a GPS tracker burning a hole in his forearm. Not literally, of course, but he's so acutely aware of it that it's hard to imagine the pair of them can't just _tell_.

Or, well. No, actually. Bill and Terry put the "woeful" in woeful amateur. They've currently been thrown off their game by the admission that Lady Penelope is not, in fact, John's fiancee.

Now he's sat on a hay bale at the back of a moldering old barn, with his wrists and ankles chafing against the ropes that bind them, and a steadily worsening headache. There's smudges and stains of grease on his suit jacket. There's an aching knot at the base of his skull and there's still water in his sinuses, he's pretty sure. With his luck he's going to get a head cold on top of the migraine and miss the appointment to retest for his Space Operation's License. Bill and Terry _should_ be planning their next move, but instead—

"So, wot, you're the type of chap goes to a party with a stinkin' rich bird what looks like _that_ —an' now you're tellin' me you're 'just friends'? But she's a right lookin' bird, though, ain't she?"

"Oh, yeah. Right lookin' bird," Bill agrees, and scratches at his head beneath the wool cap he wears. He grins a gap-toothed grin. "Nicked her shoes, too. Got 'em back in the car. _Proper_ nice pair of shoes. Gotta be worth a few quid."

If they turn up at a fetish auction, John's reasonably certain he'll never hear the end of it. "We're _just friends_ ," he repeats.

"With, wot, with _benefits_ then, right?"

" _No_."

Bill elbows Terry in the ribs. Terry rubs his nose and sniffs, folds his arms. Terry seems to be the skeptic, when it comes to the believability of the fact that John and Lady Penelope could have a friendship that begins and ends with friendship. He juts his jaw out and challenges, "So, wot, you gay then?"

John just shakes his head and sighs.

"Well, there has to be one of the other four of them that makes a better prospect, if the ginger's not on the roster."

Penelope's beginning to grow concerned that they'll go flying by their turn and miss their chance to rescue "the ginger", but Aunt Sylvia seems unable to drive unless she's got something to natter on about. "I don't know! I've known them all far too long. Scott works far too hard. John's not interested and never has been, and is far too dear a friend to me to me, besides. Virgil's—of an unavailable persuasion. _Alan's_ seventeen."

The engine growls in Aunt Sylvia's stead, as the older woman gives her a little more gas.

"Do you assume I can't count, Penelope?"

"No, Aunt Sylvia, I certainly—"

"So what is it about the fourth of these boys that bears a conspicuous glossing over?"

This is horrifically awkward, not in the least because the champagne's gone and brought a bright, warm flush to her cheeks. "Gordon was my first choice, but he's off tagging flightless cormorants in the Galapagos," she blurts.

Aunt Sylvia scoffs lightly. "Rather daft looking creatures, aren't they? Still, conservation is a noble goal. All your charity work, Penelope, one thinks that might be counted a positive."

"I'm told he has an arrest record in New Hampshire."

"I've an arrest record in plenty of places, Penelope, it hardly disqualifies one from polite company."

It's certainly the champagne that's to blame for the fact that she's gone bright red. "He once did a naked photoshoot for Greenpeace." And the fact she'd feel the need to bring _that_ up, as a point to Gordon's detriment. Definitely down to the champagne.

Her Great Aunt is utterly unfazed. "Admirable cause. Unless—does he not look _good_ , naked?"

" _Aunt Sylvia_!" Shock and abject horror, by this point, and then strenuous denial. "I'm sure I haven't the first idea."

"Well, if he was your first choice, presumably you've seen him before. If you're aware that he's done a naked photoshoot for Greenpeace, then you have to have at least an _inkling_ of the first idea."

Before Penelope can engage in a strenuous denial that she's ever seen the pictures in question, they've already come up on their turn. Aunt Sylvia guns the engine to close the distance, and _throws_ the little vehicle sharply into the curve. The rattle of the car's undercarriage over a rough dirt road becomes too much to talk over.

Mercifully.

"Nothin' wrong with bein' gay, mate. S'2060. Bill's gay. Aintcha Bill?"

"Too right."

"Gay _and_ ginger. Howzat for rotten bloody luck?"

Bill snorts indignantly at this. "Oi."

"Sorry, Bill. Anyway, cheer up, there. Ain't nothin' wrong with bein' gay an' ginger. Certainly weren't my intention to conflate the unfortunateness of bein' ginger with the perfectly acceptable quality of a bloke bein' gay."

" _Oi_."

Bill punches Terry in the back of the head and a moderate scuffle ensues.

John wonders if he's sober yet. Medically it's probably not possible, but he certainly feels as though he's moved on into the hangover stage of inebriation. Potentially drunkeness is the reason he still seems to be inclined towards pointless chatter, and feels compelled to argue, feels the need to raise his voice to get his captors' attention. "I'm _not_ —I'm not sure why you _care_ —but I'm not anything that needs a label. Or anyway, not one that concerns either of _you_. Other than _hostage_ , maybe."

Terry grunts from where Bill's headlocked him into his armpit, and manages to squirm free. John's not afraid of either of them, exactly, but as Terry straightens up and steps forward, crosses from a band of sunlight through the broken roof and into a patch of shadow—"sinister" isn't the label John would've chosen, but there's still a slight shiver down his spine, and the ache at the back of his skull is a sharp reminder of the probability of violence.

Especially when Terry rolls his shoulders and muses, rather darkly, "Well, if you ain't romantically inclined towards nor entangled _with_ her ladyship, I ain't sure I see why she'd wanna pay to get you back. Seems like you might be a waste of our time, mate."

Oh.

Possibly he should have stuck with the girlfriend angle.


	13. birds and bargains

**birds and bargains**

 _Wherein a great deal of ranting goes ignored and the price of a ransom is insultingly low_

 **THE GALAPAGOS ISLANDS, 2060**

"Well, all I'm saying is, if I had _known_ she was gonna need a date for someplace, we could've done this _next_ week. Right? Clarence? Stumpy? Louise? Flappy Bird? I'm just saying. Not like you bastards are _going_ anywhere, on account of the whole 'flightless' thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. 'Endangered'. But, like, how much _more_ endangered are you gonna get, in a week? I'm just _counting_ you. I'm not sat on my ass with a shotgun guarding the damn island, or anything. So, what, there's eight hundred and thirty eight of you this week. Maybe next week it'd be eight hundred and thirty-five. Would've saved me a bit of time, even."

The cormorants do not especially care about the fact that Gordon Tracy has missed out on a chance to escort Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward to a garden party. Doesn't mean they haven't heard about it, though. Insofar as it distracts the large blue creature from the act of picking each of them up in turn, attaching small plastic tags to ankles, and tallying up their population on a small waterproof tablet, the stomping around and ranting has been a welcome diversion.

"And you know what else? _Screw_ John, that smug asshole. He doesn't even _like_ parties. And with the _selfies_. Honestly. That's just him being a _bastard_ , is what it is, that's just...I mean! I could've been with _Penny_. Instead I'm _here_. With _you_ losers. And like...honestly? Honestly, I did not know there would be penguins here too. You guys can't expect to compete with penguins. Have you _seen_ penguins? Those fucks are adorable. But I would still punt every last one of 'em into the Pacific if it would have meant being the plus-one at a garden party with Lady Penelope. I mean—not _actually_. Look, guys, no offense, but you're just not that cute. You're all kinda dopey looking. You're not as cute as penguins, and you're definitely not as cute as...as... _man_. Penny. You don't even _know_ , you guys. ...aw man, though, c'mere. Yeah, you. Mr. Fluffy Butt, just...c'mere a minute—"

Mr. Fluffy Butt is plucked unceremoniously from the top of a rock, and plunked down in Gordon's lap as he pulls his phone out for the twentieth time.

"—Look at this. See what he sends me? Ignore the stupid ginger bastard and his stupid smug face. Beside him. That is _Penny_. That is Lady Penelope Creigton-Ward and _goddamn_ can that woman take a selfie. _God_. Look! With that tiny little _lip bite_ , just _kill me_. I am _dead_ now. I mean, _come on_. Lookit! Hey—Fluffy, c'mon, you're not looking. So okay, admittedly the cormorant standard of beauty is kind of just on a scale of 'more scraggly' versus 'less scraggly' and I can't actually tell which direction is preferable, even considering I've been here a week watching you weird little turkeys getting all _kinds_ of freaky, but lemme tell you, as an _expert_ in the nuances of the human form—that? Is a beautiful goddamn lady. That is just about as close to flawless as you get. And a real, one hundred percent, legitimate actual _Lady_ , too. Gaaahhh."

Mr Fluffy Butt is released from captivity and Gordon heaves a huge, theatrical sigh. He knows better than to fling himself backwards, bare and rocky as this particular bit of the Galapagos is, but he wilts gingerly back on his elbows and stares morosely up at the sky. "There's another thing, too," he mutters. "She looks _gorgeous_. And I know it for an incontrovertible damn _fact_ that every last beautiful inch of her is _wasted_ on my stupid damn brother. Man. Man! Fuck you, Johnny."

Suffice it to say, Gordon's not feeling very charitably towards John, when his phone rings.

Not, of course, that he expects it to be John. John has been stolidly ignoring the flood of infuriated, envious texts that Gordon's sent him, and he knows better than to tip his hand by texting Penny about it. Not that he hasn't thought about it, but he doesn't want to make himself out as a petty, jealous asshole.

Doesn't matter. It's an unknown caller, but that never especially bothers him, he's a lot less cagey than his brothers are, with regard to his personal number. He's let plenty of people know that he's got a week off from work and that anyone who wants to give him a break from bird tagging is welcome to give him a call to chat.

"Y'hello? You've reached Gordon Cooper Tracy, now accepting name suggestions for an assortment of dumbass looking birds on sunny Isla Isabella. Go ahead caller, first five birds are free!"

"...sorry, you're who now?"

"...Oh, Terry? Terry. Like...oh! Terry from Melbourne? Hey, chucklefuck, you _totally_ skipped out on your round when we did that pub crawl two weekends back, you're buying next time I'm—oh, no? Terry? Sorry man, I dunno a Terry if you're not Terry the chucklefuck from Melbourne—"

"...which brother? The _tall_ one? Riiiight—yeah, real funny. They're _all_ tall to me, brah. _Which_ 'tall one'?"

Gordon sits up and startles the cormorants.

"The _ginger_. Oh, _really_? Yeah? Yeah, man, go right ahead. Put him on the line."

"... _Johnny!_ What a _pleasure_ to hear from you, brother mine, how's the weather in the British Isles? Getting some freckles on that big ol' nose of yours? Sorry I wasn't on the island when you came down. Like. _Really_ sorry. Can I just say, your smug fat face is looking _very_ well. Punchability factor's up by like, at least thirty percent. I could stretch to forty, even. So. How's Penny?"

There's a silence long enough that a few of the cormorants take notice. Silence is a rarity from their big blue companion.

"...whaddaya mean, 'kidnapped'? Who the hell'd wanna kidnap _you_?"

"...Bill and Terry. Uh. Yeah, not helping me much, there, bro. Do we know Bill and Terry? I don't know a Bill and I don't know a Terry, unless he's from Melbourne. Are you sure those are their real names? And are you _sure_ you've been kidnapped? I don't think kidnappers usually give out their names, Johnny. It sounds like you may have accidentally made some friends. Don't be alarmed. Just keep being yourself, they'll bugger off eventually."

"...well, I dunno! What, so it doesn't seem like you've been kidnapped to me, this doesn't seem like how that phone call would go. Also, why the hell would you call _me_? I-have-been-kidnapped is a _Scott_ problem. It is not a _Gordon_ problem. Hell! You're in England, jackass, why is it not a _Penny_ problem? I thought you were at a party, what the hell happened with that?"

"...Mmm. Mmhm. Really? Like, an honest to god monocle, like, you don't think it was fake or anything? Damn. No, yeah, I thought it was a cartoon thing too. Huh. Damn. Ritzy party you landed your ass at, Johnnycake. Mmhm. Mmm. ...a _hedge maze_! Really? Aww, no fair, I've always wanted to—well, yeah. Yeeeahh, but... _no_ , Jaybird, corn mazes are not 'basically the _same_ '. Jesus. ' _Hi_ , I'm Gordon Cooper Tracy, straight outta Hicksville, Kansas, home of the world's largest _corn maze_. Wanna go tip some cows?' Yeeahno. Mmm. Wait, a hedge maze...is that when you...? With the...? _Asshole_. I sent you all those neat looking birds, man, and _that's_ how you repay me? ...like _hell_ it was her idea. Nuh huh, no way, Johnny. Mmm. Yeah, okay, so then what? ...Croquet? You're shit at croquet, I'd kick your ass. Uh huh. Uh _huh_. Right, if you won, it's 'cuz you _cheat_ —oh, a draw. Yeah, fair enough. Umm...hmm? What, say again? Melba toast. To _ducklings_. No! Don't feed wild animals. Rule one. Just don't do it. — _yes, duck pond ducks still count as wild animals. Listen, Johnny, narrowly avoided animal abuse aside, at what point exactly did you get the idea that you'd been kidnapped? Because so far I_ _—okay, okay, okay. Sorry. Yes. Yeah. Lost your phone, okay. Hedge maze. Got it. Ditched your watch. Why would you...? Oh, drunk. Hahaha, how drunk? ...six_ glasses? And you fresh outta orbit, brother, your ass is gonna be _so_ hungover. I almost might be starting to feel sorry for you. And then...hm. _Hmm_. Oh, ow. Back of the...? ...no, yeah, no, I believe you. S'just...well, we all know you're about as coordinated as a newborn giraffe at the best times, Johnny, and you probably don't even have your land legs back yet. You sure you didn't just have a fall? ...Are Bill and Terry paramedics, maybe? Are you in a big white car with a light on top?"

The big blue creature goes quiet again. The big blue creature gets to his feet and rubs at his jaw, then scratches the back of his neck. The big blue creature is beginning to get a little nervous, which is making his flightless companions a little bit nervous in return.

"...no, paramedics would definitely not stick you in the trunk. Oh. Uh, damn, man, maybe you should've led with that bit—umm. Uh. You okay? Like...I mean, are they threatening you, or anything? ...okay. Good, that's good. I think. Uh...why'd you call _me_?"

There's probably something somewhat touching about the idea that Gordon's is the only number John can remember off the top of his head, drunk and mildly concussed and in the company of two kidnappers. But it probably has more to do with the fact that Gordon's texted him almost two hundred pictures of assorted birds in the past twenty-four hours. The fact remains, Gordon's not exactly well positioned to _do_ anything, stranded as he is in the Galapagos.

"...Put Terry back on. Yeah. It's gonna be...well, it'll be okay, John. Yeah. Sit tight."

He doesn't actually know what the protocol is, for kidnapping. This is really not a _Gordon_ problem. Definitely not a Gordon problem. This is a Kayo problem. He should probably call Kayo, only he doesn't know what the hell Kayo's gonna do either, but then, that's why she's Kayo and he's Gordon. Regardless, he should probably stay on the line. So far, at least, Terry's seemed pretty reasonable.

"...Terry. Uh, hey man. So. So, uh, that's my brother you got there, huh? Umm. What's...uh. What's the plan, then? Please don't cut any bits of him off, or anything, okay? No need for that, I totally believe you've got him. No fear there. Um. So, like...is this the bit where we talk ransom?"

"...oh it is? Right. Right, yeah, okay, I can totally... _totally_ handle that. I am definitely not in the middle of nowhere and only able to do whatever I can do with my phone. Yup. So. Uh. How much you want for him, then?"

There's another silence. The cormorants shuffle around rather restlessly. The untrained observer might mistake them for being interested in the drama playing out for their big blue companion.

"...come again?"

Even if John _has_ stolen a date with Penny out from underneath him, it's still an insultingly low number. Respective to the family's net worth, it represents a drop in a bucket that's probably bigger than Bill or Terry can even conceive, if they'd kidnap _John Glenn Tracy_ and only ask for a paltry fifty grand in return for his health, safety, and restored freedom.

Gordon's got a sharp sense for when people are kidding, though, and he gets the idea that Terry's dead serious. So—

"Uh. Yeah! I mean...yeah. Yes. Sure. Fifty k. And you'll let him go? Like...I mean, I can just _do that_. And then you can just let him go. D'you have a...umm. I think I need an account number, but yeah...just...uh. Just text me that, and I'll hook you up. Yeah. —yeah, man. No, it's no problem. No, no, no—it's cool. Yeah. Hang on a sec."

Fifty grand, _hell_. He spends that on _surfing_ in a year.

For a moment Gordon considers whether it's going to be worth giving up surfing for the next year.

To his credit, he doesn't consider it for very long.

His phone buzzes in his hand. An account number sits in his messages. He's already thumbed through several screens and submitted a thumbprint and a retinal scan to his own bank account. He can probably expect a call from his account manager, after this, but it shouldn't be too much worse than the one time he bought a whole entire house for a lady he met while jogging on the beach in Santa Cruz. As worthy causes go, this is probably about the same caliber.

He's pretty sure he won't get in trouble. Pretty sure he'll get John _out_ of trouble, too.

Well.

Probably.

"Hey, guys?" Gordon clears his throat and solicits the good will and general karma accrued from a week of tagging and accounting for nearly a thousand dopey looking birds in the Galapagos Islands, purely out of the goodness of his heart. "I know you don't have fingers, exactly, but uh, cross something for me, okay? He's a dumbass, but he's _still_ my brother."

There's some shuffling of feathers and a few squawks. It's about as good as it's gonna get.

Here goes nothing.


	14. rescue and reprise

**rescue and reprise**

 _Wherein we come to the end of the story._

* * *

 **CREIGHTON-WARD MANOR, 2060**

They let him go

Or, more accurately, after a slap on the back from Terry and a scruffy kiss on the cheek from Bill, they leave him be. They take off. He stays put. When their rattletrap old Bentley roars to life outside and departs with a whiff of petroleum exhaust, John's still tied up and sat on a musty old hayrick, bales of moldy hay stacked high in the back of some anonymous barn in the English countryside. He listens to the sound of the car growing distant, with a wicked headache and a vague impression that this was an experience that was maybe meant to be traumatizing, but has instead come across as stupefying and mildly surreal, with only hints of pain and terror.

So, that's lucky.

Miraculously, still not the worst party Penelope's ever dragged him to. Top five, for sure. Top three, even. But still probably not as bad as that one time in Amsterdam and _nowhere_ near as horrific as New Year's Eve, 2058.

Still not great, though.

John closes his eyes and takes a few deep breaths, and then reclines against the scratchy, grey-smelling wall of hay at his back. He means it only to be a few moments, just long enough to collect himself and then start to work on getting his wrists and/or ankles unbound—but when he blinks again, it's because Penelope's appeared from someplace, calling his name and shaking his shoulders and sounding just the tiniest bit frantic.

" _Oh_! Oh, John—dearest, I thought for just a moment that…that you were…that they might've really _hurt_ you. But you're all right. Aren't you? Yes. Thank goodness. _Oh_. John Tracy, you _scared_ me!"

" _I_ scared _you_?" It comes out a little more bewildered than indignant, strictly speaking, but he's still getting his bearings.

" _Yes_." Penelope is a full foot shorter than he is, probably at least fifty pounds lighter, but still nearly knocks him over when she flings her arms around his neck and latches on. It's all a little bit ridiculous. She's in a dress of delicate floral chiffon and she still hasn't got any shoes, but then, neither does he. John's not exactly in a hurry to tell her that these have been stolen by Bill the Kidnapper. He's not entirely sure he wants to know why Bill the Kidnapper would've been more interested in Penny's cream leather Louboutins over his own similarly abandoned brown oxfords, given that the latter would obviously be the more practical choice. But it's neither here nor there, at the moment. For as tight as she's hugging him now, it's entirely possible that Penelope was actually rather scared.

And then, muffled from against his shoulder— "I _told_ you you were going to get lost in that bloody hedge maze."

This is the sort of thing your best friend says to you, after you've been kidnapped.

It's also the sort of thing John can't help but laugh at.

* * *

A couple of hours later finds them in Aunt Sylvia's drawing room. It's an impressive space and lavishly appointed. Tasteful landscapes in gilded frames, portraits of severe looking people from assorted other centuries. Ornate antique furniture. Surprisingly comfortable couches. Penelope comes from a childhood of never having been permitted to sit on these particular couches, and so she considers the fact that she is currently curled up at the end of a glossy leather Chesterfield with John's head pillowed on her lap to be an immense personal victory.

She's not certain if he's sleeping, sprawled out as he is along the length of her great aunt's Chesterfield, in the drawing room to which they've both retreated after the unfortunate incident of the kidnapping at the garden party. His shoes are still MIA, as are hers, and he's shrugged out of his jacket and undone his waistcoat, the one that matches the pretty floral fabric of her dress. He's been furnished with a cold washcloth and has this pressed over his eyes, against his forehead, such that Penelope can't tell if he's asleep or not. He very well might be. His breathing is deep and deliberate and even, and the hand not holding the washcloth in place hangs limply at the end of the arm he's got hanging off the couch. He hasn't moved for at least five minutes. Poor lamb.

She's also not certain if John cares about the usually forbidden status of this particular couch in this particular drawing room in her great aunt's sprawling manor house, but it's John she has as an excuse to be here at all, and excused from the tedium of the rest of the party. She pats his chest fondly.

He stirs slightly at that, shifts his shoulders with a groan. His right hand doesn't move from where it keeps the cold compress in place, but he twitches the long fingers of his left a little vaguely in acknowledgment, knocks his knuckles against the hardwood floor. " _Nnnmm_. Mm. What?"

"Oh, nothing particularly, my darling. I wasn't sure if you were asleep. Were you?"

Another groan, with a whimper on the tail end which she suspects to be rather theatrical. "Can't sleep, dehydrated. Headache. Vertigo. Actively dying. Otherwise fine. How're _you_?"

This last is sarcastic, but she knows John better than to be offended. Instead she reaches over and gently moves his hand to adjust the compress over his eyes, pats his fingers affectionately. "Can I have Werthers fetch you anything, dearest? Some water, a fresh washcloth, aspirin? Glass of Scotch, perhaps? Steady your nerves."

This gets him to peel away the existing washcloth, and Penelope is favored with an accusing glare from one bright green eye. "My _nerves_ are fine. I have a _concussion_. And I don't know why the hell you still think I drink Scotch."

Penelope smiles, a rueful little quirk of her rosebud lips. "Well, because we drank rather a lot of it that one New Year's Eve party we had. _You_ remember. At my London flat? Two years ago now?"

"I do _not_ , which is precisely why I _no longer drink Scotch_."

" _Oh_ , is that why?" She can't help but laugh a little at that. "What a shame, darling. It's impossible to get you to sing if you're not drunk, and you're such a charming tenor. I'm told we performed rather a endearing rendition of 'People Will Say We're in Love'. I do wish someone had thought to record it."

He makes a disgruntled little noise about that. "Rodgers and Hammerstein are the architects of every embarrassing thing you've ever made me do."

"Mm!" Penelope disagrees. "Not true. We do that bit from Les Mis and that's by someone else entirely."

"I'm substantially less embarrassed as Javert than I am as Curley."

"From what I remember of New Year's Eve, _I_ was Curley. Anyway, it's not _my fault_ you've a terrible weakness for musical theater."

"It's _entirely_ your fault that I've even seen any musical theater in the first place. You dragged me to the seventieth anniversary run of Les Miserables every day for a _week_. It was _brainwashing_."

"Mmm. Seventy-fifth, this year. I've already bought our tickets. And I bet you still cry when Fantine dies."

He huffs defensively, but doesn't deny it. "I'm asleep now. I'm sleeping."

Penelope flicks the tip of his nose with a manicured finger and gets swatted at clumsily in return, except John can't aim with his eyes closed and misses by a wide margin. Penelope catches his wrist and plants a kiss on the palm of his hand, leaves the blush imprint of her lipstick against his skin. "You're all right _really_ , though," she insists, as he grudgingly allows her to keep hold of his fingers.

"We'll see. At the moment, I'm trying very hard not to get a migraine, and you're being distinctly unhelpful."

"But other than _that_ , you're fine."

John apparently takes issue with this assessment, and corrects her, "I'm _intact_. No part of me was severed and mailed to my family in exchange for a billion dollars. I suppose that's technically a positive. We'll leave it there."

Penelope tuts sympathetically. "Well, Aunt Sylvia's already said we can stay as long as we like, until you're feeling better. She's really very sorry for what what happened, you know."

John's overall opinion of Great Aunt Sylvia has gone from general wariness to certainty that her aunt is actually insane. He hasn't said as much, nor would he, but Penelope knows him a little too well. It's an opinion conveyed in the long, reproachful pause before he says, "She said she wanted to catch up to 'William' and 'Terrence' and ask just how they managed to fit me in the trunk of an antique Bentley."

"Well! Professional curiosity, my love, you're well over six feet tall. The raw geometry of that achievement is simply a matter of interest. And they _stole_ that Bentley, you know, the absolute fiends. She'll fetch it back, though, don't worry. It's over a hundred years old, in near perfect condition, and worth nearly a million pounds. Do you know, I'm beginning to think they didn't actually realize?"

"Bill and Terry? _No_." The sarcasm is unsubtle.

"Aunt Sylvia will sort it out."

"Sure she will."

"And she'll get them to wire your ransom back."

"They can keep it. It's Gordon's money anyway."

" _No_ , they certainly can _not_. She'll make them apologize, too."

John actually winces at that. "No, no thanks. _She_ can keep it if it means I don't have to deal with them again."

"Dearest, they kidnapped you."

"And the worst part of the whole ordeal was actually interacting with them. So, no, no apology necessary. She can lock them both in her wine cellar and rack them to death, or boil them in oil, or put screws in their thumbs or whatever the hell the aristocracy does with the criminal classes."

"Well, we employ them, generally, in my family's case. You're well aware of Parker's sordid history. Werthers took Great-Uncle Langley for over two million pounds with a confidence trick, and they hired him on the spot. They _did_ manage to snag you out of a party full view of some of the sharpest members of the European intelligene community. If we attend again next year, it's entirely possible they'll be on staff groundskeepers." She shrugs. "Who's to say what she'll do when she catches them? But mark my words: she _is_ going to catch them."

John actually shudders at this. "I don't know why it surprises me that your family keeps _tame criminals_ on hand as staff, but so far it sounds like one of the saner things your aunt has done." He pauses and then, "Don't tell her I said that."

In spite of everything, Penelope feels a distinctive glow of pride for her Great Aunt. "She got kidnapped once. In Belarus. Uncle Langley didn't even know she was missing until the kidnappers sent him five hundred thousand rubles and a note of apology."

"Mmhm." One would have to have known John for as long as Penelope has to catch the note of drowsiness starting to creep into his voice. She remembers the same from late nights of study, or from long walks home from social engagements that neither of them had particularly wanted to attend, but which were made bearable by attending together. "Sounds like a story."

Definitely tired. And rightly so. Penelope smiles fondly. "My bedtime story, frequently."

"Umm." He sighs again and shifts slightly on the couch, curls up, just a little. He's quiet for a while, and she begins to wonder if he's actually gone to sleep and what she'll do if so, when he asks, "What time * is* it?"

Penelope glances habitually at his wrist, but he's not wearing his watch at the moment. It's still tucked in the toe of his similarly absent shoes, sat at the edge of the fountain in the center of the hedgemaze. She glances around the room for a clock, but the face on the grandfather clock at the far end of the room is too ornate to be read at distance. "Oh, I don't know. Six or so. The sun's going down. It's fine, John. Shh."

"I need to be in Houston in thirty-six hours."

"And I said you had nothing to worry about on that score, darling, I promise. You'll be there with bells on."

This time John discards the compress, probably no longer cold anyway. It lands with a wet thump on the floor, and he stares up at the ceiling with a perfectly morose expression, classically tragic. It occurs to Penelope that he should be rendered in oils, framed, and hung on the far wall of her aunt's drawing room. He repeats himself, "I need to be in Houston in thirty-six hours so I can categorically fail my SOL exam and wind up stranded on Earth for another month."

Penelope rolls her eyes. "John Glenn Tracy, you've never failed an exam in your life."

There's definitely some melodrama happening now, his sigh is appropriately theatrical. "I can't even remember how many planets there are."

"That's down to an excess of champagne and a mild concussion, my love, and both will wear off."

"I was not promised champagne and a concussion, I was promised caviar and croquet."

"And charming company," Penelope reminds him, always sharp when it comes to the terms of established contracts.

"Has someone been charming in my company? Must've missed it."

Penelope tweaks his ear in retaliation, but he smiles and opens his eyes to give her a _look_ , the sort they've been sharing for years now.

And in the fading golden light of sunset, alone together in the drawing room of her Great Aunt's grand old manor house—there's a moment. Just the briefest, barest moment, that brings her six, nearly seven years back, now, and reminds her of a time when they were both much, much younger. Her first time meeting him, she'd met someone young and solitary and quiet and distant, far from home and in pain, alone and vulnerable. Her heart had gone out to him then, and it seems she'd just never gotten it back. If she'd been told that one day she'd love him more than anyone she's ever actually been in love with, and be perfectly content with that; she would've laughed at the impossibility.

For his part, if John had been told a decade ago that one day his best and dearest friend would be an apparently flighty young British heiress, who would insinuate herself past his strictly defined and well-maintained personal boundaries and force a reevaluation of the way he'd lived his rather solitary life, he probably would've found an excuse to go live alone on top of a mountain in attempt to avoid her. And both their lives would've been the lesser for it.

But instead they're both here, and she has her fingers threaded between his, his head in her lap. John trusts her with his life, and more than that, with the love he guards so closely, shares so rarely. She trusts him to keep her carefully in check, to answer all her clever lines with ones that are cleverer, and to see through all her obfuscation, to see _her_ underneath.

And in a way that neither of them could've imagined, ten years ago, John squeezes her fingers and says, "You know I love you."

She smiles, and knows him well enough to bow her head and gently kiss his forehead. "Yes, darling. I love you, too. But I also know you well enough to hear the 'but…' that you're waiting to add to the end of that sentence."

He returns her kiss to the back of her fingers, affection as elegantly understated as always, even as he concludes, "But I fucking _hate_ your parties."

This is the sort of thing your best friend says to you, after you've gotten him kidnapped.

This is the sort of honesty Penelope's always loved the most.

* * *

Anybody who's officially nobody attends Sylvia Creighton-Ward's annual garden party, and Sylvia Creighton-Ward's annual garden party has come to its conclusion. Nobody's in attendance any longer, but then, on paper at least, nobody was to begin with.

Months of planning, all culminated in a long and lovely afternoon, with a brief diversion near the middle to account for a minor kidnapping. That had actually been a remarkably brisk little outing. Got the blood up. Sylvia _does_ love a chase, and anyway it's all sorted out and taken care of, and the children have been bundled into the house to take their tea and have a nice rest. Now the grounds are being tidied up, the kitchens are starting to wind down, and all of the staff are going meticulously through the household, looking for any surveillance devices surreptitiously planted by the guests. Werthers is in the "wine cellar", conducting a job interview for Messrs Bill and Terry, evaluating their potential fitness for a position within the household. At present, her butler is not optimistic.

It's nearing midnight, and Sylvia's niece is curled up, _not_ , as expected, in the guest room where she's stayed since childhood, but on the chesterfield in the blue drawing room, snuggled cozily against her tall, redheaded, and previously unmentioned best friend. There are words that need to be had with Lord Hugh about his failure to inform Sylvia that Penelope has had someone so near to the inner sanctum of her most intimate social circle, for the past _six years_. It remains appallingly bad form for Penelope to be caught— _snoring_ —fast asleep on top of someone whom her Aunt hasn't personally vetted.

But, disappointingly, they're both fully-clothed and it's all perfectly innocent. And even if it weren't, he seems nice enough. For spending most of his time aboard one of the most powerful satellites operating in the world today, John Tracy seems remarkably down to Earth. He'd taken the minor kidnapping more or less in stride, and had even been gracious enough to accept her apology that it had happened on her watch. And, if she trusts Penelope's word on the subject, they're no more than very dear, very intimate friends. It's almost a shame. They do look rather charming together, even if he's entirely too tall, and _offensively_ too redheaded.

She hopes that one of the others turns out to be a potential prospect, someday. His family's work is of unimpeachable merit, and their _money_ is the sort of constantly dynamic American capital that lives and grows and _breathes_ , the sort of wealth that makes her own family's old money seem almost rather stodgy. She's already got a small dossier building with regard to Number Four, golden boy blond and summer sunshine sweet, and with _some_ sort of quality that makes her niece blush, when mentioned. Sylvia's own tastes and recommendations run a little closer to the approval of Number One, and she's developing this as a backup. He's still too tall, but at least he's a winter, and dark hair and greying temples have always met Sylvia's personal approval. It's a shame about the redhead.

Still. Old habits die hard. and as Aunt Sylvia crosses the room, as light on her feet as she is in her low heels, not making a sound. She's got the young man's shoes in one hand, and his watch in the other. The former she sets gingerly on the floor at the foot of the couch. The latter she fiddles with for a few moments, and then angles a careful shot with its camera, snaps a few pictures. The lights are low, but she's very experienced in the matter of surreptitiously taking photos of things she's not supposed to. For a moment she contemplates sending a copy to herself and then deleting it. Instead, she carefully unfolds John's fingers from where they're wrapped around her niece's shoulder, tucks his watch beneath them. He stirs with a soft little sigh and then resettles, pulling Penelope just a little closer. She coughs just slightly, takes a deep breath, and then the snoring stops.

Bless.

And then, appropriately grandiose, Lady Creighton-Ward gently drops a blanket over her niece and her uninvited guest.


End file.
